Books

Book of the Week
The London Times

Book of the Week
The London Evening Standard

‘Daniel Kalder…deserves a medal…Dictator Literature is a great book…An insightful book, but also a funny one.’
The Times

‘I enjoyed this book a great deal . . . it’s actually a rather snappy read.’
Will Self, Guardian

‘With a nimble style and an eye for leaden prose…Kalder’s work is quite an accomplishment, and is the one book people interesting in the terrible writing of dictators should read.’
Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)

‘A fascinating study…partly an enjoyable romp but mostly a sombre sidelong-glance
history of 20th-century totalitarianism.’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Brisk, and full of antic fun.’
New Statesman

‘This about the most discomforting book I’ve read in the past year. Never mind Trump and never mind Twitter: Daniel Kalder demonstrates that words themselves, and the escapist spells we weave with them, are our riskiest civic gift. Kalder’s claim – that he has read the deathless prose of tyrants so we don’t have to – does not go nearly far enough. Dictator Literature sweeps aside the ideas and intentions of its subjects (Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and their imitators) and reveals what’s really been going on: an epic, word-transforming battle between words and reality, between people as they are and people as we would like them to be.’
Simon Ings, author of Stalin and the Scientists

‘The fact that Kalder sometimes finds merit in a dictator’s writing—usually, it must be admitted, before he became dictator, for power corrupts words among the many other things that it corrupts—is testimony to his laudable open-mindedness. His judgments are not facile… [a] valuable book.’
Anthony Daniels, The Weekly Standard

‘Hugely compelling…Like coming across a planet-sized car crash, with hundreds of millions snarled up in the wreckage: you can’t look away. Kalder has really dug deep into the minds of these infernal texts’ creators, and thus delivers some truly enlightening insights.’
Irish Independent

‘Full of…wonders, and startling individual facts…An overwhelmingly powerful reminder of 20th-century misrule, and of just how delusional human beings can be―especially if they’re literate.’
The Daily Telegraph

‘This books is hilarious and horrific, appalling and enthralling.’
Francis Wheen, The Oldie

‘Kalder is our cheeky and irreverent guide to the (generally aggressively tedious) prose by history’s despots.’
Tatler

‘…a perverse feat of literary endurance.’
To the Best of Our Knowledge, NPR 

‘A compelling examination of why bad minds create bad writing, and therefore a valuable read for anyone interested in literature–or the world, in fact. Every writer is certainly a  little dictator, and every dictator, it seems, a little writer. Kalder’s dry humour makes Dictator Literature a fun tour de force through the mad history of the 20th century and the present.’
Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed