Simon Sebag Montefiore - Titans of History: The Giants Who Made Our World

We do not shudder at the depths to which men and women throughout history have sunk, but experience a piquant relish.A book that reminds us how thin the veneer of civilisation is.

The Times (London)

A survey of great historical figures favours villainy over goodness.A compilation of short biographical profilescatering to our appalled fascination with evil. Monsters outnumber heroes. Stalin, the subject of Montefiores superb two-volume biography, is the prototype for many of the maniacal autocrats whose rages and rampages are described here. A strutting parade of psychopathic dictators, warlords, malevolent dwarves.Montefiore finds room for a few gods, one or two secular saints, American founding fathers, Lincoln and Churchill, and a smattering of artists and scientists, but their achievements hardly manage to maintain the pretence of civilisation. What excites Montefiore is villainyand he does this with wicked verve.

The Observer (London)

Comprehensive, chilling and highly compelling. A first-class chronologically arranged catalogue that engages as it teaches.

Daily Express (London)

S IMON S EBAG M ONTEFIORE is a prizewinning historian whose bestselling books have been published in more than forty-five languages. Catherine the Great & Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards; Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Award, Los Angeles Times Biography Prize and Le Grand Prix de Biographie; Jerusalem: The Biography won the Jewish Book Councils Book of the Year prize; The Romanovs: 16131918 won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Book Prize. Montefiore is also the author of the acclaimed Moscow Trilogy of novels Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon and One Night in Winter, which won the Political Novel of the Year Prize (UK). He received his PhD in history at Cambridge University and now lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.

www.simonsebagmontefiore.com

J OHN B EW is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at Kings College London. He is the author of five books, including Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016).

M ARTYN F RAMPTON is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include The Long March (2009) and Legion of the Rearguard (2010).

D AN J ONES is a journalist, broadcaster and historian. His publications include The Plantagenets (2012), The Hollow Crown (2015) and The Templars (2017).

C LAUDIA R ENTON , previously an actress in both television and theatre, is a practicing barrister and the author of Those Wild Wyndhams (2014).

ALSO BY SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

Nonfiction

Catherine the Great & Potemkin

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Young Stalin

Jerusalem

The Romanovs: 16131918

Fiction

Sashenka

Red Sky at Noon

One Night in Winter

Childrens fiction (with Santa Montefiore)

The Royal Rabbits of London

The Royal Rabbits of London: Escape from the Tower

TO MY CHILDREN, LILY AND SASHA

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2018

Copyright 2012, 2017 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great Britain, in different form, by Quercus Editions Ltd, a Hachette UK company, London, in 2012, and an updated edition subsequently published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, a Hachette UK company, London, in 2017. Published by arrangement with The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Portions of this work originally appeared in Heroes (Quercus, 2008) and Monsters (Quercus, 2009).

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Names: Sebag Montefiore, Simon, 1965 author.

Title: Titans of history : the giants who made our world / by Simon Sebag Montefiore ; with John Bew, Martyn Frampton, Dan Jones and Claudia Renton

Description: First Vintage Books Edition. | New York : Vintage Books, 2018. | Previously published by Quercus in 2015.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018014804

Subjects: LCSH: Biography. | BISAC: HISTORY / World. | HISTORY / Reference. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.

Classification: LCC CT104 .S33 2018 | DDC 920.02 Bdc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014804

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN9780525564461

Ebook ISBN9780525564478

Cover design by Perry De La Vega

Cover images: Catherine the Great Pictures From History/The Image Works; John F. Kennedy Superstock; Henry VIII Imagno/Austrian Archives/The Image Works; Nelson Mandela Brendan Bell/Alamy Stock Photo; Margaret Thatcher David Levenson/Alamy Stock Photo

www.vintagebooks.com

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to David North, Mark Smith, Patrick Carpenter and Josh Ireland; to my fellow contributors Dan Jones, Claudia Renton, John Bew and Martyn Frampton, all gifted historians; my agent Georgina Capel; Anthony Cheetham; Slav Todorov; Richard Milbank; Mark Hawkins-Dady; Professor F. M. Eloischari; Robert Hardman; Jonathan Foreman; and my publisher at Orion, Holly Harley. And, above all, my darling children, Lily and Sasha, and my wife, Santa.

INTRODUCTION

When I was a child, I read a short article like one of those contained in this book about the sinister world of Josef Stalin. It fascinated me enough to make me read more on the subject. Many years later, I found myself working in the Russian archives to research my first book on Stalin. My aim is that these short accessible and vivid biographies will encourage and inspire readers to find out more about these extraordinary individuals the men and women who created the world we live in today.

But history is not just the drama of the terrible and thrilling events of times gone by: we must understand our past to understand our present and future. Who controls the past controls the future, wrote George Orwell, the author of 1984, adding, Who controls the present controls the past. Karl Marx joked about Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III, saying, All historical facts and personages appear twice the first time as a tragedy, the second time as farce. Marx was wrong about this as he was about much else: history does not repeat itself, but it contains many warnings and lessons.

Powerful men and women have rightly studied history to help them steer the present. For example three of the twentieth centurys most homicidal monsters, Hitler, Stalin and Mao all of whom appear in this book were history buffs who spent much of both their misspent youths and their years in power reading about their own historical heroes. At the time that Hitler came to order the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, he was encouraged by the Ottoman massacres of the Armenians during the First World War: Who now remembers the Armenians? he mused. The Armenian massacres feature in this book. When Stalin ordered the Great Terror, he looked back to the atrocities of his hero, Ivan the Terrible: Who now remembers the nobles killed by Ivan the Terrible? he asked his henchmen. Ivan the Terrible too is in this book. And Mao Zedong, as he unleashed waves of mass killings on China, was inspired by the First Emperor, another character who can be found in this books pages.