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
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 fr
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
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 circl
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 eld