Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pages that you cannot put down. Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature. While most of Sebag’s books are biographies of people, Jerusalem is a biography of a city—a city, as he writes, that is “the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice in heaven and on earth.” The book takes you through Jerusalem’s 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, and it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel and with Trump a few weeks into his second presidency, we could not think of a better person to talk to than Simon about this moment and how to understand it. Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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From the free press, this is honestly live in New York City. Thank you.
Hell yeah! I'm Barry Weiss, and I am thrilled to be here with you tonight. Did you guys know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with a lot of naked dwarves?
Did you know that Catherine the Great, long smeared as a nymphomaniac, was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod's genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and honestly, I don't remember any of it. But not my guest tonight, not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pagers that you cannot put down.
Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great, to name a few, are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature. Most of his books are biographies of people, but Jerusalem is a biography of a city.
A city, as he writes, that is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice, in heaven and on earth. The book takes you through Jerusalem's 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, many of them in China, which we're going to learn about.
And it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel, with Trump, I think, 72 hours into being president again, I could not think of a better person to talk to than Sebag. So, Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome to Honestly.
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