I meet Simon Sebag Montefiore at the Ivy in Kensington. He walks in swiftly in a jacket and cap — his dress code is half-landowner, half-radical — but I have never known him to be still.
I find him charming, constantly moving and detached. His superb Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Jerusalem and Catherine the Great and Potemkin are rich, intense and amazingly readable. (The usual criticism of Montefiore is also why I love his writing: he writes like a journalist.) Now he has travelled further. During the pandemic he wrote The World: A Family History, which he describes as history “from the Stone Age to the drone age”.
Here, he traces families and empires, ignoring the usual emphasis on Europe and North America, treating the Jews as another diaspora people and aspiring nation though, as the scion of a famous Jewish family — Sir Moses Montefiore was a Zelig character who founded the new city of Jerusalem — his ancestors, who were Mexican, Moroccan and Lithuanian, appear in footnotes.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore
There is something soothing about global history; however bad things are, we don’t live in the 14th century.
The World is almost narcotic to read. Global history makes you think in sequences, in gaudy patterns.
As the late Hilary Mantel, a writer he loves (alongside John Le Carré), wrote: “Under every history, another history.” We wouldn’t be in the Ivy, for instance, if his father hadn’t handed him Arnold J Toynbee’s 12-volume A Study of History and if the Soviet Union hadn’t fallen.
We drink tea in the corner — he knows the staff — and he tells me that he was “a mischievous nerd,” as a child, “really very strange, there is no doubt about it”. He “read everything”.
His father gave him the Toynbee when he was seven, and said: “Maybe one day you’ll write something like this.”
He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and thought he would be a politician.
“I interviewed Thatcher as a schoolboy,” he says. “I was very sceptical, so I gave her quite a hard time. She said to her private secretary, ‘I’m not giving anymore interviews to obstreperous schoolboys,’ so I ruined it for everybody else.”
He doesn’t look unhappy about this. Historians treat everyone the same.
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Simon's book The World
Instead, he became a banker in New York. Of course, it was too boring for him. “I didn’t completely belong in that world,” he says, and I am fascinated by the caveat “completely”.
He is more culturally Jewish than religious. “I’m not a massive one for organised religion,” he says — though he prays at Kol Nidre — and adds that “Jews both reflect their time, and they often reflect their place too.”
He is a very British Jew, who married into an old English family; his wife is novelist Santa Palmer-Tomkinson, and he is a friend of King Charles III.
“I’ve always been obsessed with Russia and the Soviet Union and when it started to disintegrate, I thought, ‘I’ve got to see it happen and so I just went,’” he says. “It was a great liberation because before that I had quite a conventional life.
“It is essential training for historians to see empires falling and it doesn’t happen very often. And I really saw it: I really saw the kind of life I wanted to live, a life of adventure.”
He loved “seeing Russian troops leaving and local troops seizing their arms and driving around with warlords in their convoys riding shotgun”.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore
This, I think, is why, despite his charm — he is gossipy and fun — he seems almost elsewhere, another Montefiore Zelig.
It’s impossible to do justice to The World here; it’s a book about everything and we only have an hour.
We rest on the Cromwell dynasty because it is more interesting than the Tudors (“England wasn’t very important in the Tudor period, and I’m bored with them”) and Cromwell let the Jews back in. He also loves the Duke of Naxos, Jewish adviser to Suleiman the Magnificent.
“A world power in his own right,” he says. “That’s the sort of character I really enjoy. He crossed many different worlds.” I suspect that he identifies.
We establish that Jerusalem was the template for The World. “Jerusalem is layered,” he says, absorbed by the recollection, “and that’s what fascinating, there’s layer upon layer. It’s not just layered but interwoven.
"People have taken bits of each other’s buildings, used them to build new buildings, new walls, new arches, sometimes you even see them upside down: somebody’s inscription has been stuffed upside down in someone else’s wall. And that’s not just a metaphor. It’s a theme.
"In Jerusalem people steal each other’s stories. Religiosity is infectious. People seek to emulate it, to beat it, to own it. It is kind of greedy, but it also shaped that strange place.”
He told the story of Jerusalem through families, and he realised this would solve the problem of The World too: how not to reduce it to “a succession of battles and economic trends”.
He speaks fluently about history, crossing centuries in a paragraph. “Using families gives you a feeling of the grit of life,” he says, “the progress of movement of generations, the way that history is made up of the lives of many people who marry, who eat, who sing in the street, who die.”
It also allows him “to follow the emergence of states, destinies of nations, from feudal baronies and realms to early modern states, then to states, then to industrialised hybrid states and democratic states. Family” — and this perfect paragraph ends neatly — “remains a constant theme.”
I ask him about his family, because any history of the world is a history of cruelty (he quotes Hagel: “History is a slaughter bench”) but also of love. He tells me that a year into their relationship, Santa, whom he calls “very exuberant”, told him that if he ever proposed, she would convert to Judaism.
“It was really important to me,” he says, “more important to me than I let on, and she divined that it was important to me. I never asked her to convert but when she offered, I was delighted because it made it feasible for me. I pretended to pay very little attention,” — I suspect this is typical — “and rang my mother to say, ‘You won’t believe what she said.’ As any Jewish boy would.”
They married in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. He wore a top hat.
It is tempting to treat Montefiore the historian like a soothsayer who can read the future as fluently as the past — a toy — and I ask him: what will happen to Israel?
“It will prosper, and thrive, be increasingly part of the Middle East,” he says, “increasingly like an Arab country, more people there will be religiously observant. I think it will last as a sort of idiosyncratic messy chaotic democracy: a west Asian or east Mediterranean power like Turkey, like Egypt, like Saudi Arabia.”
He is not worried about Brexit either, but if you know about Ivan the Terrible, nothing will give you sleepless nights.
“I voted to Remain,” he says, “but I am not one of those people who are in a kind of frenzy about what a disaster Brexit is.
"I think this is how you avoid revolutions: you have democracies that make decisions, people vote and change things, that is how you let off steam, that is how you avoid violence. I think it was misguided but I think in retrospect it will be regarded as a rather minor event. We might,” he stops to ponder, “get closer to Europe again.”
He adds: “Probably the democracies will muddle through. It’s still the best system. I don’t think we’re going to end up with dictatorship in Britain any time soon.” Fascinatingly, he thinks the monarchy is partially to thank for this.
“Since the early 19th century, the Windsors have become the guarantors of British democracy, the personification of British liberal democracy, which is why they have lasted. To avoid the threat of over-mighty, even elected dictators, becoming too powerful.
"There is always the Trump threat.” He does fret about climate change though — “everyone is aware of what they need to do, the question is will they do it?” — and the nuclear threat:
“We are on the verge of a much more nuclear age.” He mentions Chekhov’s principle of the rifle hanging on the wall: it will eventually be fired.
The hour is almost over, and I ask him, of everyone he writes about, who he wants to meet.
“I want to meet everybody,” he says swiftly, and I feel foolish for asking. But there is somewhere this Zelig would settle: in the royal circle in Baghdad, between — and he is very specific — 750CE and 900CE.
j“I would have loved to have been a writer at that time,” he says. “The time of One Thousand and One Nights.” Briefly he looks wistful. “I like to think I would have fitted in well.”
‘The World’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore is published by W&N (£35) and out now
