Description
Book Synopsis'Brilliant' Sunday Times
How does a truly disastrous leader – a sociopath, a demagogue, a tyrant – come to power? How, and why, does a tyrant hold on to power? And what goes on in the hidden recesses of the tyrant's soul?
For help in understanding our most urgent contemporary dilemmas, William Shakespeare has no peer.
'Brilliant, timely' Margaret Atwood, on Twitter
'A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves' Nicholas Hytner
Trade ReviewIn this
brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare’s tyrants and their tyrannies—their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties, their arrogant incompetence, their paranoid viciousness, their falsehoods and their flattery hunger—
Stephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate (in Shakespeare’s words) “general woe”. -- PHILIP ROTH
Brilliant, timely -- MARGARET ATWOOD, on Twitter
A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves. -- Nicholas Hytner, former Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre
Brisk and highly readable -- Jonathan Bate * New Statesman *
Brilliant -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
