Simon Sebag Montefiore

Best-selling author Thomas Keneally explains that the Cold War biographies couldn’t afford to say that Stalin was attractive, or that Lenin was magnetic, but they were, because otherwise people wouldn’t have followed them. He picks some great introductions to Revolutionary Russia.

Eminent historian on pre-Soviet Russia with unique access to the Moscow archives says Dostoevsky’s Demons is about Russia’s future. ‘It’s about what has happened, and what’s going to happen … You smell it and taste it’