Written in History

What do letters reveal that history books often hide? In Written in History: Letters That Changed the World, Simon Sebag Montefiore argues that handwritten letters are humanity’s most vivid testimony—our spontaneous, unfiltered records of love, power, creation, and loss. Through his curated selection of letters from emperors, revolutionaries, artists, and ordinary people, Montefiore shows how correspondence captures human truth in ways that political records or historical chronicles rarely can.

Montefiore contends that the letter form—whether scratched on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia or tapped out in a modern presidential communiqué—echoes the rhythms of history itself. Letters offer a meter of our deepest ambitions and anxieties: they show the moments when private emotion collided with public consequence. His chosen letters span four millennia, from Babylonian kings and Egyptian pharaohs to modern figures like Nelson Mandela and Donald Trump, illustrating how written words have shaped empires, movements, and hearts. The book is not simply a collection but a mosaic that reflects how human beings have tried to make meaning out of time, power, and emotion.

Letters as Living Time Capsules

Montefiore invites you to view each letter as a living artifact. The act of writing, he notes, is more than communication—it’s an assertion of existence against oblivion. He sets this within an emotional archaeology that ranges from the clay tablets of Rameses the Great to the despairing note of Kafka ordering the destruction of his works. Each letter carries its sender’s pulse forward across centuries. Montefiore points out that when Chekhov writes from Sakhalin about children forced into prostitution, or when Rosa Parks quietly narrates her defiance from Montgomery, time collapses between “then” and “now.” You feel the immediacy of moral witness: the letter makes past suffering and courage entirely present.

A Universal Chorus of Voices

Across his global panorama, Montefiore arranges letters thematically—Love, Family, Creation, War, Blood, Power, Downfall, Goodbye—to show that emotion and intellect, poetry and statecraft, always intertwine. In Love, Frida Kahlo writes in vivid color-drenched metaphors to Diego Rivera; Emperor Suleiman crafts immortal verses to his concubine Hürrem; and Henry VIII’s fervent, possessive words to Anne Boleyn ignite the English Reformation. War unfolds through the dispatches of Napoleon from Austerlitz and Peter the Great to Catherine I, portraying how generals sought both victory and domestic affection. And under Downfall, we see figures writing from the edge of their own extinction—Abd al-Rahman III measuring joy in only “fourteen days,” or Bukharin begging Stalin for mercy. Together, these letters trace emotional truth across civilizations.

Why Letters Matter Today

In an age dominated by fleeting digital messages, Montefiore’s work reminds you of what is lost when communication leaves no physical trace. Letters are deliberate; they require time, reflection, and risk. By committing their voice to paper, the writers of these letters made themselves vulnerable—and therefore unforgettable. Montefiore mourns this near-lost art, noting that even modern power brokers resort to handwritten or couriered letters when words truly matter. His examples—from Trump’s theatrically menacing letter to Kim Jong Un in 2018, to George H.W. Bush’s warm handwritten note welcoming Bill Clinton into the Oval Office—underscore that authenticity and legacy still depend on words you cannot instantly delete.

The Moral and Emotional Thread

At its heart, the book connects two kinds of history: the intimate and the imperial. Montefiore claims that while conventional history tells of decisions, letters reveal the feelings behind those decisions. When Maria Theresa scolds her daughter Marie Antoinette for frivolity, she unknowingly writes the prelude to revolution. When Émile Zola pens his open letter “J’accuse,” moral duty becomes political detonator. And when Nelson Mandela writes to his wife from prison, his tone of serenity and steadfastness becomes a manifesto on how to endure injustice. Letters, Montefiore insists, are both historical documents and existential mirrors. They show the human hand trembling as it shapes the fate of nations—and of hearts.

Reading Written in History therefore feels like entering a vast conversation across time. Its letters are confrontations, confessions, and testaments of love, courage, folly, and power—proof that civilization is, at its core, a chain of messages written in human blood and ink. As you turn its pages, you’re reminded not only of what these correspondents achieved, but of what all of us lose when we stop writing words meant to last.

Few emotions blend intimacy and politics as vividly as love, and Montefiore’s letters of passion show how affection has repeatedly shaped empires, art, and personal destiny. Through the private words of monarchs, poets, and rebels, love emerges as both a creative force and a political weakness—an energy capable of toppling thrones or birthing masterpieces.

When Love Became Revolution

King Henry VIII’s obsessive letters to Anne Boleyn illustrate this duality perfectly. His craving for her body intertwines with his craving for control, propelling England into the Reformation. Montefiore reads Henry’s famous missive—where he declares his heart’s “bondage” and sends her a bracelet bearing his portrait—as the spark that severs England from Rome. Love becomes state policy. In the same spirit of political intimacy, Catherine the Great’s effusive letters to Prince Potemkin show how a sexual partnership evolved into one of the most productive political alliances in history. Their banter—half flirtation, half decree—reshaped Russia’s empire.

Sensuality as Self-Expression

Montefiore balances royal correspondence with the tempestuous romances of artists. Frida Kahlo’s fevered letter to Diego Rivera reads like one of her canvases—riotous with color and pain. She writes of her body as landscape: “The hollow of your armpits is my shelter.” Similarly, the erotic prose between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller blurs love and literary creation. Nin’s confession—“I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world”—transforms sexual passion into poetic warfare. Love, in these letters, becomes language itself.

Letters from the Edge of Desire

Even farewell letters vibrate with desire. The mysterious “Henriette” bidding goodbye to Casanova writes with dignified tenderness, vowing chastity while knowing she has given him “the most perfect felicity.” Their tone—half heartbreak, half liberation—reveals that romantic correspondence can dignify pain. Montefiore includes these alongside the final exchanges between Leonard Cohen and his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, whose simplicity (“See you down the road”) reduces love’s endurance to its sweetest, purest truth.

Across all these letters, Montefiore reminds you that passion refuses containment: it ripples outward into religion, war, and art. Whether lovers wield power or poets wield pens, love’s ink stains history’s ledger more deeply than law or treaty.

Rulers, from Babylonian kings to nuclear-age presidents, have always used letters to govern empires and justify wars. Montefiore’s selection shows that the art of command often rests on the turn of a phrase. Every empire’s destiny, he suggests, has been sealed by something written in haste and sent with authority.

Authority and Hubris in History’s Ink

Consider Rameses the Great dismissing a Hittite king’s plea to heal his barren sister, a missive dripping with sarcasm: “A fifty-year-old woman cannot bear children.” The arrogance of power thunders through three thousand years. Fast forward to 1941, and Adolf Hitler’s letter to Mussolini mirrors the same imperial certainty: he assures his ally that invading Russia will be quick and logical. Montefiore places these side by side to show how rulers’ confidence, memorialized in writing, precedes catastrophe. Letters become monuments to hubris.

The Charm of Diplomacy

Empires also communicate through courtesy. The 1917 Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild promises Jewish national restoration “without prejudice” to Arab rights—a diplomatic balancing act whose reverberations define modern politics. Likewise, the gentle yet calculated exchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis captures the letter at its most consequential: two men trying to write the world away from nuclear annihilation. Montefiore reads Kennedy’s decision to answer only the conciliatory note as a masterpiece of restraint.

Modern Spectacle of Power Letters

Even in recent decades, the epistolary form persists as political theater. Donald Trump’s 2018 letter to Kim Jong Un brims with bombastic sentiment—equal parts threat and invitation. Montefiore titles it “the first nuclear love letter,” arguing that the grandiloquent syntax conceals both personal insecurity and the enduring belief that writing can change fate overnight. Yet he juxtaposes this with George H. W. Bush’s handwritten message to Bill Clinton: a humane goodbye from one leader to another. Both reveal how leaders use letters to script not only policy but identity.

Through these correspondences, Montefiore convinces you that empires are not merely built with iron or gold—they are composed sentence by sentence, sealed with signatures that outlive armies.

Montefiore devotes an entire section to letters about art, invention, and creative agony. These dispatches show that behind every masterpiece is correspondence laced with doubt and obsession. Great creators, he argues, use letters as laboratories for their genius.

The Artist at War with Himself

Michelangelo’s lament from the Sistine Chapel—“My beard points to Heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket”—illustrates creativity as physical torment. Flaubert’s bawdy accounts from Cairo similarly link sensual experience with literary texture: his escapades become source material for the realism of Madame Bovary. Picasso’s lyrical note to Marie-Thérèse Walter translates erotic obsession into art: “You are everything to me.” Each letter captures creation as compulsion—art born from exhaustion and excess.

Bridges Between Science and Imagination

Not all creators wield brushes. Ada Lovelace’s 1844 letter to Andrew Crosse radiates prophetic intellect, seeing divinity in mathematics: “Religion to me is science, and science is religion.” Wilbur Wright’s 1899 note to the Smithsonian, modest yet visionary, charts the course of human flight. By embedding invention in moral wonder, both writers prove that creative correspondence can turn theory into revelation.

The Private Cost of Genius

Letters from Keats, Kafka, and T. S. Eliot reveal how creation consumes the self. Keats’s declaration to Fanny Brawne—“I could be martyr’d for my religion; Love is my religion”—brims with ecstatic despair. Kafka’s final letter to Max Brod, demanding the destruction of his manuscripts, reads as both confession and failure of courage. Eliot’s rejection of Orwell’s Animal Farm—a missed chance to publish a timeless allegory—shows the paralysis of intellect facing risk. Montefiore treats these exchanges not as tragedies, but as reminders that all creation, artistic or ethical, depends on daring to write what frightens us.

Whether sculpting marble or mapping the heavens, the creators in Written in History write themselves into existence. Their letters are the sketches behind every revolution of the mind.

Courage takes many forms—on battlefields, in sickbeds, and within prisons. Montefiore curates letters that transform fear into dignity, showing how the written word has often been the last weapon of the powerless.

Facing Death with Composure

The letters of Sir Walter Raleigh and Fanny Burney could not be more different but share a calm defiance. Awaiting execution, Raleigh writes to his wife Bess urging her not to grieve: “Death is only an incident.” Burney, describing her own mastectomy without anesthesia, reports her agony with eerie detachment—turning pain into testimony. Both make mortality eloquent and purposeful.

Resistance in Confinement

From prison cells, moral courage becomes spiritual power. Nelson Mandela’s letter to Winnie Mandela reminds her that “a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.” Alan Turing’s devastated note to Norman Routledge—“I shall shortly be pleading guilty”—embodies another kind of bravery: honesty in a world that criminalized love. Montefiore notes that both men, persecuted by their governments, found redemptive clarity through writing.

Moral Fire Against Injustice

No example surpasses Émile Zola’s open letter “J’accuse!” to the French president, which blew apart the Dreyfus Affair. Its fiery accusations—naming generals and ministers—redefined civic courage. Similarly, Zola’s spiritual descendants—Gandhi’s letter to Hitler pleading for peace, Rosa Parks’s note from Alabama asserting quiet defiance, and Zola’s own risk of exile—show how letters can confront tyranny with ink instead of arms.

Montefiore’s section on courage demonstrates that survival is not the measure of bravery—expression is. When truth is written under oppression, every word becomes an act of resistance.

Every letter written at the brink of disaster reflects humanity’s most intimate truths. Montefiore’s closing sections—Downfall and Goodbye—bind the grandeur of empires to the fragility of the individual, reminding you that even the mighty must one day write their last line.

Empires in Twilight

Abd al-Rahman III’s deathbed meditation counts only “fourteen days of happiness” in fifty years of rule—a haunting arithmetic of kingship. Simón Bolívar’s letter from exile laments, “He who serves a revolution plows the sea,” a recognition that ideals outlast their creators. Both transform defeat into wisdom. Likewise, Aurangzeb’s 1707 letter to his son confesses regret for a life of conquest: “I came a stranger into the world, and a stranger I depart.” Heaven and history converge in humility.

Farewell to the World

When Hadrian addresses his “little soul” on the eve of death, Montefiore calls it “the most elegant goodbye in history.” The emperor’s tone—half philosophical, half tender—illuminates acceptance without despair. Centuries later, Leonard Cohen’s note to Marianne Ihlen carries the same serenity: “I’m just a little behind you; see you down the road.” Across millennia, love and mortality share the same quiet cadence.

Not all farewells are peaceful. Nikolai Bukharin’s agonized plea to Stalin mixes fear and devotion—“I ask for morphine”—exposing the psychology of totalitarian submission. In contrast, Churchill’s letter to his wife Clementine, written “in the event of my death,” closes with gallant faith: “If there is anywhere else, I shall be on the lookout for you.” The two letters, one broken, one brave, encapsulate the spectrum of the human soul confronting extinction.

Montefiore ends his anthology as it must end: with silence turning into gratitude. Through goodbyes written in candlelight, you feel the continuity of hope—that as long as letters exist, none of us truly vanish.