Simon Sebag Montefiore

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.

‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’

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.

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason.

Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice—in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. The very fact that Jerusalem is both terrestrial and celestial means that the city can exist anywhere. New Jerusalems have been founded all over the world and everyone has their own vision of Jerusalem.

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.

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.

What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.

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.

‘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.’

Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have.

‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her.