Philip Mansel’s King of the World on Louis XIV is a masterwork. Three books have given me great joy, the best royal biographies I’ve ever read. Simon Sebag Montefiore, which books that you read recently did you enjoy most? You can buy lunch in the canteen for about a dollar and have quite good soup. There are dynasties of archivists – all the archivists are the children of archivists – and there’s that very strange institutional feeling of Russian bureaucracy. I used to take a real delight in being in the very peculiar Russian archives.
What’s everyone doing there? Some people are making political deals and conspiracies, other people are meeting lovers, and other people are alone.ĭid you enjoy researching the Russian archives for the story of the Romanov dynasty?
I love hotels, because they are mysterious. Is it a very good time for people to read books? Even though it’s been a terrible time for writers to launch books, there have been a lot of great books. I went to Sicily, but otherwise I’ve been living like a monk in a monastery in an apocalyptic era. You enjoy travelling, but last year were you unable to? I’ve been lying low, sometimes in the country, sometimes in London. I have been reading manically, and writing various secretive projects. Montefiore shows how the murderous paranoia and gangsterism of the criminal underworld, combined with pitiless ideology, taught Stalin how to triumph in the Kremlin.Simon Sebag Montefiore, what were you doing during this long past year of coronavirus? The secret world of Joseph Conrad-style terrorism was Stalin's natural habitat, where he charmed his future courtiers, made the enemies he later liquidated, and abandoned his many mistresses and children.
What forms such a merciless psychopath and consummate politician? Was he illegitimate? Did he owe everything to his mother - was she whore or saint? Was he a Tsarist agent or Lenin's chief gangster? Was he to blame for his wife's premature death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful? Born in poverty, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet, trained as a priest, but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary.
This enthralling biography that reads like a thriller finally unveils the secret but extraordinary journey of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar. Yet Stalin hid his past and remains mysterious. Stalin remains one of the creators of our world - like Hitler, the personification of evil.
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