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" A crenelated wall of books encircles my bed, its tottering towers looming ever taller, always on the verge of collapsing onto oblivious sleepers. "
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Books
Towers
Wall
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" It is a characteristic of potentates that they don't succumb to peaceful retirement. Instead, they hold power in their hoary fists as judgment and grip weaken, destroying any successors except family members. "
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" The tsar of War and Peace, especially in the BBC version, is a complete popinjay and a useless character. The real tsar, Alexander I, had an amazing career. "
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" I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine. "
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" Every time I give an interview, I seem to offend somebody in my family, usually my mother. "
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" President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s. "
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" While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet. "
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" Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov. "
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" She grounded me. I have become very disciplined now. I would never have written the books without her. Definitely the cleverest thing I ever did was to marry Santa. Maybe it's the only clever thing I did. "
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" In 1942, the Germans were running out of fuel. They were advancing so fast across the grasslands, the hot grasslands of south Russia, and the Russians were running out of tanks. And so both of them turned to cavalry, and there were great cavalry battles on the grasslands. "
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" When I'm up, I'm over-exuberant; when I'm down, I just wander round on my own. I have no middle space. "
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" Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status. "
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" I'm the last person who would end up doing something that needs meticulous compilation of facts. It's totally against my character. I live by impulse. I'm totally ill-suited to writing history books. "
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Character
" A book's title is vital. "
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" Russia's first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean. "
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" Around us, we do see attempts to delegitimize Israel, a sort of secret, hidden anti-Semitism growing in many countries, often on the right but also on the left. "
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" One of the strange things about doing publicity is that a mistake in a newspaper profile long ago is repeated and amplified over time. "
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" Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield. "
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" Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin's gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he's right about everything like a tsar. "
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