'Wry informative but deadly - a great book' Will Hutton 'Fast-paced and impassioned' Sunday
Telegraph Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their
imitators. A fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seized power and why they fell.
There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators that history
progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism despite the odd
hiccup. Every democracy however sophisticated or stable it may look has been attacked or
actually destroyed by a would-be Caesar from Ancient Greece to the present day. Marx was
wrong. Caesarism is not an absurd throwback it is an ever-present danger. There are Big
Caesars who set out to achieve total social control and Little Caesars who merely want to run
an agreeable kleptocracy without opposition: from Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell through
Napoleon and Bolivar to Mussolini Salazar De Gaulle and Trump. The saga of Boris Johnson and
Brexit is a vivid if Lilliputian instance of the same phenomenon. The final part of this book
describes how and why would-be Caesars come to grief from the Gunpowder Plot to Trump's march
on the Capitol and the ejection of Boris Johnson by his own MPs and ends with a defence of the
grubby glories of parliamentary politics.
