That said, so dangerous is the politician who does not read like the one who only reads a book that can apply to any situation. Surely it is so, although everything about Churchill is exceptional. The politicians of before read and wrote more, like Winston Churchill. History itself is not valued as before, and that results in less capable rulers. Another problem is the degradation of the humanities in our educational system. Our culture has exalted democracy, and it is essential that every voter can punish incompetent or corrupt leaders, but generates dysfunctionalities that are difficult to correct. Even the most preeminent figures enjoyed space for business, relaxation, sports.

This was not the situation of the great political leaders of yesteryear. There is a constant battle to keep the voter's attention. Is current politics losing sense of history? The digital revolution barely leaves room for isolation and meditation. Its effect in the political sphere is also more immediate and favors a culture of immediacy and the short term. The letter is created in an area of intimacy with the recipient, while electronic communications are much more impersonal and lonely, they are not addressed to anyone in particular. The difference is that they are too fast, too easy, which reduces that reflective component that I referred to earlier. Social networks and emails are part of the reality of a moment and in the future they will be useful sources for writing history. Within 100 or 200 years, can we say the same about Twitter and Facebook posts? A tweet is still an open letter. It offers us the point of view in context. What does a letter contribute to a historian? It is a resource of enormous value, something authentic, intimate, spontaneous and, at the same time, a reflexive piece, which gathers concerns, thoughts and perspectives of the character in question. The main sources of my books are archival material and correspondence and I was very seduced by the idea of sharing these first-person history stories.

Where does the idea of doing this anthology of letters come from? It was something spontaneous. Simon Sebag Montefiore, an Englishman educated in Cambridge, a disciple of experts in Russian history such as Robert Conquest and Robert Service, is the author of a great biography of Stalin, but fame came with Jerusalem, a bestseller in which he explains with great skill narrative how the holy city was built, and with the recent Written in history, a compilation of letters in which specific moments are captured and which wants to be an invitation to the layman to read history.

Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore