Historian

When we were in school, we were told that Stalin was a madman who got control of Europe, which teaches you nothing.

When I'm up, I'm over-exuberant; when I'm down, I just wander round on my own. I have no middle space.

In Georgia, where I spend much time, the democratically elected pro-western President Mikhail Saakashvili has been beleaguered by a riotous opposition which proposes creating a constitutional monarchy under the Bagrationi dynasty, with a Spanish racing driver, Prince 'Jorge' Bagrationi, as king.

Unlike monarchs, who pass power to their heirs at the moment of death to ensure the survival of the regime, tyrants must simply survive as long as possible.

Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status.

Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators.

I enjoy tequila, which has a strange effect on people and makes parties more fun than warm white wine.

I love the heat and the excitement of Israel, and I will always love Jerusalem.

Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

As a youth, I was much more of a Zionist. But Israel was very different then. Israel's changed, and so have I.

Writing about Jerusalem can be such a minefield.

The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia.

One of the strange things about doing publicity is that a mistake in a newspaper profile long ago is repeated and amplified over time.

I'm the sort of person who, if I arrive in a city under siege, in the middle of nowhere, I'll always find my way to the leader of the rebels. I just don't know how.

Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861.

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.

I was driving across Georgia with a warlord and his bodyguards riding shotgun with their Kalashnikovs in a convoy of Mercedes and Land Rovers. The guy put on Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' on a cassette, which they played on loudspeakers as we raced across the mountains, and I remember thinking, 'This sure beats respectable life in England.'

It's the mix of the trivial and the great events that make up history. It's the low things about high people that make it fascinating, and that's why it would be a shame to exclude the trivial things. That mixing up is not just at the heart of history. It's at the heart of how to live a great life.