Book description
There have been many biographies of Stalin, but the court that
surrounded him is untravelled ground. Simon Sebag Montefiore, acclaimed
biographer of Catherine the Great's lover, prime minister and general
Potemkin, has unearthed the vast underpinning that sustained Stalin. Not
only ministers such as Molotov or secret service chiefs such as Beria,
but men and women whose loyalty he trusted only until the next
purge.'This magnificent portrait of the dictator' Richard Overy,
Literary Review Born in 1965 Simon Sebag Montefiore is a biographer,
novelist and journalist. He contributes to the Sunday Times, the
Spectator and the New York Republic and New York Times in the USA. In
the early nineties he travelled through the turbulent ex-Soviet Caucasus
and Central Asia and in 1996 presented a Channel 4 documentary on his
2000 mile desert quest for slavery in Mauritania. He now lives in London
with his wife, Santa, nee Palmer-Tomkinson, and two children.
