Were the signs that Putin is a ruthless dictator there all along? How should we deal with President Xi of China? THE DICTATORS will contain 64 essays detailing the lives of some of the world’s infamous dictators, going back to 600BC up to the current day.
THE DICTATORS:
A Warning from History
by Iain Dale
Hodder & Stoughton, April 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)
THE DICTATORS will feature essays on 60 of the most significant and notorious dictators from the 4th century BC to the present day. Unlike the subjects of the previous three books in this series, which were self-selecting, the decision about who to include will be subjective. It will be Iain’s personal choice, and he will include a mixture of ‘usual suspects’ and less familiar figures. The essays will be written by a range of academics, historians, commentators, political journalists and serving politicians. Each contributor will be carefully chosen. Most have either written about their subjects before or have a personal connection of some sort.
THE DICTATORS will be selected according to a defined set of criteria, and will include elected and unelected dictators, wartime and peacetime dictators, those driven by ideology and those with a reputation for sheer brutality. How did these tyrants, autocrats and despots seize power and how did they exercise it? Are there specific character traits that all dictators share? What can we learn from them in order to spot the warning signs in future?
By studying a wide variety of dictators in different parts of the world and throughout history, themes and patterns will inevitably emerge. The book is acutely relevant to world politics today.
As the subtitle states, it will serve as a warning from history.
Iain Dale is an accomplished broadcaster, presenting his own daily radio show on LBC, and several podcasts including the Iain Dale Book Club and The Presidents and Prime Ministers to accompany the Hodder books. He is a regular on CNN, Question Time, Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5, The Andrew Marr Show, Politics Live and a myriad of other political programmes too. He is a regular columnist for the Telegraph, Evening Standard and the ‘i’ newspaper and has a weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press and East Anglian Daily Times.
After his sudden rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most dramatic period of British history in almost a century. From the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August 2019 to the Conservative party’s historic landslide victory later that year, the agonising upheaval of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the Afghanistan crisis, the conflict in Ukraine, and the series of devastating scandals that were ultimately Johnson’s undoing, his premiership has been more explosive than any other in living memory.
2017. West Londoner and comic Ayesha is just about finding her feet on the stand-up scene – but it’s hard when stuffy venues only let one minority act on the bill. Then, after her vocal reaction to a sexist heckler goes viral, she suddenly finds herself in the spotlight and welcomed into a group of seasoned activists, all committed to the fight against sexism and the patriarchy. Ayesha is funny, can write the scripts, get people to listen, but she doesn’t have the connections of these powerful women – especially veteran activist Frankie and performance artist India Baxter-Wright – and she’s in awe of them.
Genderfluid Eamon Kastellakis wants to be beautiful. More than anything, he dreams of wearing couture dresses by the designers he worships, Alexander McQueen and Gucci, well away from the roar and threat of his alcoholic Greek da in their decaying house in Cork, Ireland.