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Sign up todayBig Caesars and Little Caesars
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Learn moreBloomsbury 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 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.
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 Big Caesars and Little Caesars, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel Making Nice.
Reviews
The power of this needle-sharp book lies in the acuity of its observations and in its ability to zoom out and see modern politicians in broader context, bringing something both fresh and timeless to an otherwise well-worn subject. Wry, informative but deadly – a great book. Mount's prose is enjoyable and some of the vignettes are a delight. [The Caesars] make for compelling reading. Mount’s prose is vivid, erudite and highly opinionated… [he] dissects all these villains in entertaining style… his range of historical reference points is impressive. Pass deep historical knowledge through the silkiest of minds and deliver the product onto the page with the most fluent of pens, and you find the combination of gifts which make Ferdie Mount pre-eminent among the political commentariat of our day. He has created a book that will endure in 50 years' time when students of British Politics will still struggle to understand how the supposedly most mature political system in the world could have placed Boris Johnson in Downing Street for three years. This is the volume they will have to read first. Always absorbing and often bitterly funny, Ferdinand Mount’s survey traces with characteristic panache an unedifying line of populist opportunists from classical times down to the shoddy and sinister figures of Johnson and Trump. His eloquent concluding call for the restoration and safeguarding of parliamentary authority has never been more urgently needed. A wonderfully wry field guide to autocrats. With tremendous wit and wisdom, the former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit identifies the qualities particular to dictators – and warns against consigning such people to history… Mount, learned to the pink tips of his ears, knows so much, and what he didn’t before, he has found out.Mount’s considerable journalistic skills deployed here in the cause of concision, the pricking of pomposity and, sometimes, his own outrage…He is especially good on Johnson…Mount is beautifully wry in this book, on top of everything else. …a fast-paced and impassioned essay. Mount is an entertaining guide to dictatorship. A wonderfully wry field guide to autocrats. [Mount] is one of the best contemporary essayists in English. He writes elegantly with an occasional brutal turn of phrase. Ferdinand Mount strolls with effortless erudition round the careers of Caesar, Bonaparte, Hitler and even Indira Gandhi. A thoughtful and cogent account of the Johnson premiership. A welcome addition to what constitutes the most vital of contemporary discussions. Delicious work, beautifully and acerbically written by a cultured man of a kind achingly rare in our world of intellectual short cuts and tawdry soundbites. Highly informative and hugely entertaining…a reminder that dictators have long been, and continue to be, a threat to democracy. A splendid book..articulated with passion and expressed with powerful rhetoric. Those interested in how someone such as Boris Johnson could have been responsible for what was possibly the greatest foreign-policy own-goal in Great Britain’s history would do well to read Mount’s book. Expand reviews
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