Michael Burleigh
Power Adapters
The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy
By William J Dobson
Harvill Secker 341pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
We seem to be living in an era when dictators are falling like ninepins. Over the last twenty years or so, we have seen examples of the type brutally murdered (Ceauşescu, Gaddafi), forced into exile (Honecker, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali), or detained and tried (Milošević, Mubarak and Charles Taylor).
Within living memory, dictators dealt with putative or real opponents by simply murdering them, as in the case of Pol Pot, or interring them to rot in Gulag systems such as the Chinese laogai. Nowadays, according to William J Dobson’s fascinating book, authoritarian regimes have to be more cunningly circumspect, though as we have often witnessed, many opponents of Robert Mugabe are beaten black and blue, while those brave or foolhardy souls who root around too closely in the murk of Vladimir Putin’s FSB-mafia state are killed – the fate of the spy Alexander Litvinenko, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Dobson has travelled 93,000 miles in order to reveal how the more sophisticated authoritarians are adapting (in the evolutionary sense) to opponents who, rather than pursuing terrorist violence, practise forms of leaderless non-violent protest that are as hard to combat as the semi-autonomous jihad of al-Qaeda.
Both sides in such struggles
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma