HeadRead 2025: In conversation with renowned historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore
The 2025 HeadRead Literary Festival, featuring top authors from all over the world, took place in Tallinn earlier this year. This installment features British historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore.
Sebag-Montefiore, and his most recent book, The World: a Family History of Humanity, uses family, in a broad sense, to tell world history. As a scion of a prominent family himself, the over 900 families Sebag-Montefiore examines include the Habsburgs, the descendants of prophet Muhammad, and Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan's bloodlines.
Sebag-Montefiore finds this approach to be an antidote to the one-person-dominating-all phenomenon which seems to have characterized historiography in recent years. This is evidenced for instance by an ongoing biography of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson now reaching its seventh volume. Similarly, another work on diplomat and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who passed away in 2023 aged 100, stretches to over a thousand pages before Kissinger even meets Richard Nixon, the political figure he is most associated with.
Sebag-Montefiore is also well-placed to write on the state of the world in having been an acquaintance of major figures such as Margaret Thatcher, former President of Israel Shimon Peres, and Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, among others.
As well as talking to HeadRead about the latest book and its writing process, Sebag-Montefiore shed light on his long association with Estonia, dating back to the earliest days after the restoration of independence. This saw him act as a go-between for the then royalist party in Estonia, and the man who they would have liked to have been king – Britain's Prince Edward no less. While the prince graciously had to decline the offer, he has been on an official visit to Estonia in recent years.
The end of the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, colonialism and post-colonialism, and the badge of honor his first book on Stalin, published 22 years ago, won in being hated by Vladimir Putin, are also discussed.
The full discussion with Estonian historian Marek Tamm can be viewed via the video player above, while other videos with authors at the HeadRead Festival from 2025 and previous years can be found here.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
