Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore (born 27 June 1965) is a British historian, television presenter and author of history books and novels.

Quotes

• To her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
  • Sashenka (London: Bantam, 2008) p. 411

Jerusalem: The Biography (2011)

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

• Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice—in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. The very fact that Jerusalem is both terrestrial and celestial means that the city can exist anywhere. New Jerusalems have been founded all over the world and everyone has their own vision of Jerusalem.
  • pp. xxv-xxvi

• Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason.
  • p. xix

• The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims.
  This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.
  • p. 16

• The European upper classes...could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one of them a King David and a Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers.
  • p. 413

• For 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years, Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer.
  • p. 516

One Night in Winter (2013)

London: Century

• ‘What’s Edith Wharton like?’
  ‘Just like our own barons and princelings here. Our secret world is just like hers but with one crucial difference—it’s Edith Wharton with the death penalty.’
  • p. 61

• War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.
  • pp. 279-280

• ‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’
  • p. 299

• He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography.
  • p. 317

• ‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present.’
  • p. 320

• Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have.
  • p. 393

• Sex fills just a few hours of our entire existence, he realized, and yet those precious minutes count more than months and years of our normal lives.
  • p. 395

• ‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her.
  • p. 426

• What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.
  • p. 427

• Nikolasha and Rosa had died for the romantic delusion: totalitarian love as reckless melodrama and desperate possession, an orchestra of trumpets and thunderbolts. Now he saw clearly that the real poetry of love was a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details.
  • p. 441

The Romanovs 1613–1918 (2016)

New York: Vintage, 2017

• Six of the last twelve tsars were murdered—two by throttling, one by dagger, one by dynamite, two by bullet. In the final catastrophe in 1918, eighteen Romanovs were killed. Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous.
  • p. xx

• An effective tsar could be harsh provided he was consistently harsh. Rulers are often killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. And tsars had to inspire trust and respect among their courtiers but sacred reverence among the peasantry, 90 per cent of their subjects, who saw them as "Little Fathers." They were expected to be severe to their officials but benign to their peasant "children": "the tsar is good," peasants said, "the nobles are wicked."
  • p. xxi

• Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality. It flows hydraulically to and from the source, but its currents constantly change; its entire flow can be redirected, even reversed. In an autocracy, the power is always in flux, as changeable as the moods, relationships and circumstances—personal and political—of one man and his sprawling, teeming domains. All courts work in similar ways. In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In this book, my aim is to follow the invisible, mysterious alchemy of power to answer the essential question of politics, laconically expressed by that maestro of powerplay, Lenin: kto kogo?—who controls whom?
  • p. xxi

• History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.
  • p. 654

• Looking back over the four centuries covered in this book, it is curious that each of Russia’s Times of Troubles—1610–13, 1917–18 and 1991–99—ended with a new version of the old autocracy, eased by the habits and traditions of its fallen predecessor, and justified by the urgent need to restore order, radically modernize and regain Russia’s place as a great power.
  • p. 656