Big Caesars and Little Caesars

'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.