February Is The Cruelest Month
“April is the cruelest month” said T.S. Eliot, but having just spent February in Scotland for the first time in 27 years I would beg to differ. I had forgotten how relentlessly
Why Doesn’t Scotland Love King Charles?
Scotland's complicated relationship with the monarchy, explained.
Please Do Not Disrespect The Dictator
I wasn’t planning to experiment with ChatGPT: the tone of the coverage, either hyper apocalyptic or breathlessly techno-utopian, bored me.
Bambi’s Mum Had To Die
When Sergei Eisenstein saw Bambi, he was highly impressed. The great Soviet film director, responsible for such world classics as Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky, pronounc
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 the
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 Che
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
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 A
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 h
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 boo