Ferdinand Mount

Big Caesars and Little Caesars (eBook, PDF)

How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

A WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR

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.

"Fast paced and impassioned" -- Sunday Telegraph

"Wonderfully wry" -- The Guardian

"...a delight" -- Sunday Times

"Delicious work, beautifully and acerbically written" -- Wall Street Journal


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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Juli 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781399409681
• Artikelnr.: 68497025

Autorenporträt

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. He is married with three children and three grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. 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 (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), 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 Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel Making Nice.

Inhaltsangabe

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

Rezensionen

Highly informative and hugely entertaining…a reminder that dictators have long been, and continue to be, a threat to democracy.