Brave is the book that sets out declaring its subject matter to be rubbish. But this isn't any old rubbish; this is rubbish scraped from the dustbin of history by Daniel Kalder, who has heroically trudged through the literary oeuvres of many 20th- century dictators. Kalder saves us the trouble of reading – if you are so inclined to begin with – the erotic novels of Benito Mussolini (The Cardinal's Mistress) or Saddam Hussein's Zabiba and the King, which details the Iraqi tyrant's affairs of the heart after he fell in love with the 24-year-old daughter of an adviser. Thankfully Kalder has a much lighter touch than, say, Joe Stalin ("Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay.") and provides an engaging, brisk, and morbidly humorous haul of the lives and literary pretensions of the murderous wingnuts who defined a century; beginning with Lenin, ending with more recent autocrats such as Kim Jong-il. In all their cases, the phrase "ars longa, vita brevis" works on too many levels.
