Essays
by Daniel Kalder
Here Be Deplorables
A few years ago I was at a wedding in Delaware when the father of the bride, on learning that I lived in Austin, asked whether Texans still wore spurs and had guns holstered at their hips. I assumed h
Tradition and the Individual Tyrant
The dictators of the 20th century were firm believers in the power of the written word. Lenin had read the theories of Marx and the Russian radical tradition but it was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s n
Death Sentences
Daniel Kalder spent almost a decade reading the books of history’s worst tyrants so that you wouldn’t have to. Here he selects some of his favorite sentences written by dictators. Colonel
An Interview with Portugal’s Expresso Newspaper
Was there anything in Salazar’s writings that impressed/surprised you? I wouldn’t say that anything “impressed” me, beyond that one of his books, Doctrine and Action, was published
10 Things I Learned From Reading Terrible Books Written by Dictators
The 20th century’s most infamous dictators were also authors, often prolific ones, complementing the atrocities they visited on humanity with crimes against literature. For his new book, Th
Daniel Kalder: The Nervous Breakdown Self-Interview
So, I hear you’ve written another book. That’s right. It’s called The Infernal Library and it’s a study of dictator literature, that is to say books written by dictat
Ask the Expert: Anti-Tourism
Daniel Kalder is the author of two of my favorite books of the 21st Century: Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist and Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia
Lost Territories
I Soul It is well-known that when Lenin died in 1924 his brain was extracted from his skull and subsequently dissected by Soviet scientists who sought to reveal the source of his genius. Less well-
On Russian Balconies
On a recent visit to Istanbul I stayed in an apartment looking out on the Bosphorus. Every morning I’d get up and see the sun sparkling on the surface of the water as birds circled languidly overhea
Kremlin Kids Gone Wild!
Life is not easy for the offspring of dictators. Look at Gaddafi’s kids, who are either dead, in prison or in exile. Bashar al-Assad would have been an ophthalmologist if his elder brother hadn’t
Movie Nights with Stalin
Stalin, like all murderous totalitarian tyrants, was big on secrecy. It’s therefore probably a safe bet to assume that he would not have been best pleased had he learned that one day his personal pa
Review: Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere
In 1974, poet and dandy Edward Limonov left the Soviet Union to live in the United States. The bisexual, bespectacled son of a secret policeman was fond of the Ramones, fascinated by revolutionary vio
Review: The Romanov Sisters
The extent to which readers will enjoy Helen Rappaport’s The Romanov Sisters will most likely depend on one or two important factors. First, it will help if you haven’t spent much time reading abo
Review: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, once noted a “remarkable feature” common to Soviet leaders: “their boundless, almost superstitious respect for poetry.” Indeed,
Review: Foligatto by Nicolas de Crécy and Alexios Tjoyas
There are not many comics which feature bloated, castrated opera singers as the lead character. In fact, it’s quite possible that there’s only one: Foligatto, by writer Alexios Tjoyas and artist N
Dictator Lit: The Poetry of Ayatollah Khomeini
Perhaps the most famous literary critic of the 20th century, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) was renowned for his vehement loathing of the work of Salman Rushdie. Indeed, the Ayatollah (or Ima
Voice
A selection of radio broadcasts and podcasts for the BBC and elsewhere, usually with me as a contributor or interview subject.
Immortal North
BBC Radio 3 (Daniel as Contributor) As the clock ticks down towards midnight and a New Year looms, it’s hard to escape thoughts of the passage of time, ageing, the meaning of it all. We lose o
Chess City: A Monument to an Impossible Dream
(Daniel as Contributor) Radio producer Gary Waleik and I had so much fun working together on the Gaddafi piece that we later collaborated on a story about Chess City, the fantastical vanity proj
Lost in the Stacks
(Daniel as Contributor) I did a ton of podcast and radio interviews when The Infernal Library came out. In the early stages I even did a radio tour, which involved answering the phone
The Worst Sponsorship Deal in the History of Pro Sports?
(Daniel as Contributor) While I was promoting my third book, The Infernal Library, I met producer Gary Waleik and did a couple of fun things with him for the sports-themed NPR radio show Only a
Podcast: The Killer’s Canon
There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won’t ever want to read,
The Digital Human: Protection
BBC Radio 4 (Daniel as Contributor) Aleks Krotowski explores living in a digital world. Listen here
Cornerstones: Siberia
Cornerstones: Siberia BBC Radio 3 (Daniel as Presenter) Daniel Kalder conjures up the vast landscapes east of the Urals, where taiga becomes tundra. Siberia is more a state of mind than a place, given
Digitising Stalin
BBC Radio 4/BBC World Service (Daniel as Presenter) For Stalin, privacy was key. So how would he feel about his secrets being revealed? The Stalin Digital Archive is the result of a collaboratio