Titans Of History: The Giants Who Made Our World - Softcover

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a master storyteller (EVENING STANDARD)

Sparkling biographical essays ... A tour of the good, the bad and the ugly (MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Entertaining and informative. Full of offbeat, fascinating detail (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

Comprehensive, chilling and highly compelling. A first-class chronologically arranged catalogue that enagages as it teaches (DAILY EXPRESS)

Compulsive reading ... We do not shudder at the depths to which men and women throughout history have sunk, but experience a piquant relish ... a book that reminds us how thin the veneer of civilisation is (THE TIMES)

A survey of great historical figures favours villainy over goodness ... A compilation of short biographical profiles ... catering to our appalled fascination with evil. Monsters outnumber heroes. Stalin, the subject of Montefiore's superb two-volume biography, is the prototype for many of the maniacal autocrats whose rages and rampages are described here. A strutting parade of psychopathic dictators, warlords, malevolent dwarves ... Montefiore finds room for a few gods, one or two secular saints, American founding fathers, Lincoln and Churchill, and a smattering artists and scientists, but their achievements hardly manage to maintain the pretence of civilisation. What excites Montefiore is villainy ... and he does this with wicked verve (OBSERVER)

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of a number of prize-winning books that have been published in forty-eight languages. CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR won the BBA History Book of the Year Prize; YOUNG STALIN won the Costa Biography Award, the LA Times Book Prize for Biography and the Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique; JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY won the JBC Book of the Year Prize and the Wenjin Book Prize in China; THE ROMANOVS: 1613-1918 won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Book Prize. He is the author of the Moscow Trilogy of novels: SASHENKA, RED SKY AT NOON and ONE NIGHT IN WINTER, which won the Political Fiction Book of the Year Award. He is also the author of WRITTEN IN HISTORY: LETTERS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and the forthcoming VOICES OF HISTORY: SPEECHES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.