WRITTEN IN HISTORY
LETTERS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
W&N, 247pp, £14.99
Ysenda Maxtone Graham praised the ‘admirable selective self-discipline’ with which the editor ‘has distilled a few millennia of world history into 240 extremely un-boring pages’ in her review for the Times. ‘As readers of his Stalin and Romanov biographies can testify, Sebag Montefiore has an eye for the spicy, the horrifying, the passionate and the shocking. Don’t expect to be lulled by witty missives of the Evelyn WaughNancy Mitford variety. Expect to see inside the minds of tyrants.’ Sure enough, among the letters chosen is one from Lenin ‘to the secret police instructing them to enforce his new regime of terror: “Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people).”’ Maxtone Graham enjoyed Sebag Montefiore’s ‘fiery’ introductions, ‘often longer than the letters themselves — much longer, sometimes 30 lines of appetite-whetting introduction to seven lines of letter… As well as the letter writers’ characters coming through strongly in their outpourings, Sebag Montefiore’s dark tastes and impatient character come through pretty strongly in his presentation.’
Equally enthralled was Marina Vaizey, who reviewed the collection for theartsdesk.com. ‘This is a totally brilliant idea for an amazing anthology, although the subtitle “Letters that Changed the World” is slightly misleading. All or any of these letters might substantially or subtly change your view of grandees of all sorts – emperors, tsars and tsarinas, kings, queens, presidents, generals, admirals, dictators, politicians, authors, artists – as well as the ordinary folk who have written them, but not all are letters that fall into that elevated category (there are certainly letters that initiated wars, though)… In this continually surprising concatenation there are some more light-hearted moments: Michelangelo complaining rather bitterly, perhaps of the physical toil of painting the Sistine Chapel, his limbs all twisted, his back aching, his head crushed, the paint dripping onto his face… Everything here is a revelatory marvel, whether a hideous rant from the Marquis de Sade (1783), or the impassioned logic of religious tolerance from Babur to his son Hamayun (1529). Truly the spectrum of human belief and behaviour is revealed in this selection.’