Big Caesars and Little Caesars Audiobook Libro.fm

Bloomsbury presents Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount read by Paul Blezard

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 its 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 wouldbe Caesar from Ancient Greece to the present day Marx was wrong This Caesarism is not an absurd throwback it is an everpresent 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 authors narrative as a vivid if Lilliputian instance of the same phenomenon

The final part of this book describes how and why wouldbe Caesars come to grief from the Gunpowder Plot to Trumps 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 thoughtprovoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government