15 quotes
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.
One Night in Winter (2013)
‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her.
One Night in Winter (2013)
What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.
One Night in Winter (2013)
Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have.
One Night in Winter (2013)
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.
The Romanovs 1613–1918 (2016)
To her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.
One Night in Winter (2013)
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.
One Night in Winter (2013)
‘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.’
One Night in Winter (2013)
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.
Jerusalem: The Biography (2011)
‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present.’
One Night in Winter (2013)
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.
Jerusalem: The Biography (2011)
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.
The Romanovs 1613–1918 (2016)
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.
The Romanovs 1613–1918 (2016)
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.
One Night in Winter (2013)