''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.>
Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Yet in modern times it''s become a strangely neglected subject. Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seize power and why they fall.
There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators from Fukuyama back to Macaulay, Mill and Marx, that history progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd hiccup.
In reality, 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. This 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 frequently crops up in this author''s narrative as 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 and a thought-provoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government.>
''Grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page'' - Hilary Mantel '' Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original'' - Hadley Freeman Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments. The story leads us from the back streets of Sheffield at the end of the Victorian age to the highest echelons of English society between the wars.
Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir like the author''s bestselling Cold Cream, and a voyage into a vanished moral world. An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, its cryptic and unforgettable protagonist Munca joins the ranks of memorable aunts in literature, from Dickens'' Betsy Trotwood to Graham Greene''s Aunt Augusta.>
