On Bashar al-Assad

With his exceptional experience in the Middle East and after peace-negotiating meetings with the Syrian leader, Brooks Newmark contributed with an essay on Bashar al-Assad to Iain Dale’s latest book, The Dictators. The award-winning broadcaster and presenter of the Evening Show on LBC Radio brings together 64 essays by historians, academics, journalists and politicians about elected and unelected dictators, wartime and peacetime dictators, those driven by ideology and those with a reputation for sheer brutality.

How did these tyrants, autocrats and despots seize power - and how did they exercise it? And how did they lose it? Very few dictators die peacefully in their own beds, after all. Only by examining these figures from the 6th century BC to the present, from ancient Greece to present day Saudi Arabia, do patterns start to emerge. The book is a unique opportunity to see the shared character traits, the common conditions, the patterns of behaviour that have enabled dictators to seize power - time and time again.

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