IliNfeC?O??N??VERSATION
Simon Sebag Montefiore shares his thoughts on hybridity, human nature and why historians don’t give good advice
● Apart from thickish spectacles, Simon Sebag Montefiore bears little resemblance to the stereotype of the learned professor. A leading historian his latest work, The World: A Family History, is a tour de force
he is dressed in jeans and trainers, exudes geniality, and is happy to chat without preconditions. “Ask away,” he says, “anything’s OK.”
Also unusual is that Montefiore isn’t keen on reinterpreting history at least not in a polemical sense. “I don’t shout in the book, ‘This is a new take’, or ‘This is an up-to-date version’,” he says. Does that not mean The World lacks a centralising theory? The book is a remarkable chronicle of humankind’s existence, but what does he want us to take away?
“Most world histories don’t have a theory,” Montefiore responds. “They say to readers: ‘You should pay more attention to this region, or that event.’ That’s not a theory.”
Instead, he argues, largescale histories have a theme, “often not a complicated one. The theme of mine is that the world is made by hybridity. Migrations, settlings; there are no pure nations or races, no pure families. This book is about the hybridity of life.”
This partly resolves my questions about “family” as the ostensible theme of The World, which I found unconvincing. Montefiore persuades me further, reminding me “not to impregnate the past with the ideologies of the present”.
The idea of families as wonderful, happy and nurturing “is a very modern concept”, he notes. Family is, he adds, “a cult of modern times, together with a sort of cult of childhood”.
Montefiore is alluding to the fact that, until little more than a century ago, most children died very young, so parents tended to invest far less in them than we do today. For all the tumult of our newsfeeds, the world’s population in the
21st century is freer, more prosperous, happier and has a longer life expectancy than ever before. “So, history books can be very distorting. And even today’s families are actually half radiant and warm, and half dark and complex,” he says.
Probing for a hint of the latter a mysterious Montefiore family secret I get instead a glimpse of the former: his wife Santa, a writer with 25 historical fiction and romance novels to her name, helps him shape ideas and structures for his work, he says with a sparkle of pride in his eyes.
Montefiore agrees to indulge me in a rapid-fire interrogation of his knowledge and opinions.
Who was the world’s most influential thinker? “In modern times, it has to be Marx. He changed everything. He’s still changing everything.”
Who was the greatest of the “greats”: Darius, Alexander, or Catherine? (He pretends to play along with my added suggestion of Muhammad Ali.) “An interesting question. The Persian Empire was inherited by Alexander, but Darius really created it. He was an extraordinary personality. He recast history, creating an empire with roads, couriers and currency. And tolerance. He’s not very well known, but he did everything.”
History’s most evil figure: 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, Stalin, Hitler or Mao? He deliberates carefully before choosing Hitler, but also chastises me for sticking to a historical paradigm from which The World tries to break. Comparing tallies like the 17million killed by Timur or the average estimate of 30-million by Mao during the Great Leap Forward misses the point. “Without being sanctimonious, in the book I want to show that one murdered person who’s shot for nothing ... well, I think each human life counts.”
The most overrated figure in history? An unexpected answer: Cleopatra. “Preposterously, she’s become a feminist icon. She murdered half her family, including her own sisters, so she can hardly be called a champion of the sisterhood. Second, she based her career on attaching herself to the brutal Roman warlords Caesar and Antony, which failed disastrously, causing her to lose her kingdom, the whole inheritance [of empire], and her life. So she was a catastrophic character.”
We meander around the centuries and the globe for a bit longer, and focus briefly on Stalin, about whom Montefiore has written two biographies. He agrees that, in transforming the Soviet Union from a moribund country to a nuclear superpower in 20 years, he was a genius, “though the costs were completely unacceptable”.
But he disagrees with my characterisation of Stalin as a psychopath. “I don’t even know what ‘psychopath’ means. Not too long ago a psychopath would be called a moral imbecile, meaning, simply, somebody who didn’t have a moral sense. This is relatively common, and they are often highly effective people in work ... their lack of empathy means they don’t care [about upsetting others], they don’t waste time and energy, which is why they are often successful.”
I ask him what he, as a Jew, thinks of the situation in Israel. “Israel’s record has many flaws, but its liberal democracy is pretty unique in the region, and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is putting it all at risk, possibly ruining it, just to stay in power. It’s a disaster.”
Does he have a view on why history keeps repeating itself? “It’s simply not true. The lessons of history are given way too much weight. I don’t think history repeats itself it’s human nature repeating itself.”
Even that is complex, he explains, referencing religious portraits from first-century Egypt: “They’re from 2,000 years ago, but they’re in colour and the people look just like us. Yet, you’ve got to realise when you write history how little you know, and have some humility about the degree to which you can inhabit somebody else’s mind and imagine a completely different mental landscape.”
So, perhaps we should be wary of any lessons or guidance from historians? “That’s good advice.” he agrees. “Especially because I think historians are not good prophets.”
Of the thousands of years and individual characters he’s written about in The World, does he have a favourite, either in time or personage? Almost immediately he highlights the rule of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, representing the start of the Islamic Golden Age.
“The writers, the poets, the singers, the mathematicians, and philosophers Baghdad in the eighth and ninth century was the greatest city in the world,” he says. “I think it’d be the most fun for us to live in. Let’s go back there!”
It’s an appropriate conclusion to the conversation because, while Montefiore’s works make fascinating reading, they also bring history to life and make it fun.