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.

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma, which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. His most recent titles for Bloomsbury Continuum include Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality, Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel Making Nice.

PROLOGUE PART ONE THE IDEA OF A CAESAR 1 Why is he there? 2 The Hero Worshipper 3 Augustus and Auguste - and Adolf 4 The Comforting Illusion 5 How it Starts PART TWO THE MAKING OF CAESARS 1 The Invention of Charisma 2 The Timing 3 The Prep 4 Being Lied to is Good for You 5 The Assault on Parliament 6 The Enemy at the Gates PART THREE THE UNMAKING OF CAESARS 1 Catiline on the Run 2 Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot (?) 3 The Dinner Party that Never Was 4 The Beer-Hall Putsch 5 Mrs Gandhi's Emergency 6 Donald Trump and the March on the Capitol PART FOUR THE SACREDEST PLACE