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Almost every dictator at one time or another has put pen to paper.

Some have wrestled with ideas with philosophy.

Many have merely vented, spearing their dire tribes onto the page.

Others have made forays into fiction, poetry, and drama, with varying degrees of success. Noiser writer Duncan Barrett spoke to a man who's made it his mission to wade through all kinds of dictator's writings.

Daniel Calder is author of the Infernal Library,

also published as dictator literature,

a history of bad books by terrible people.

I enjoyed reading your book enormously, but I'm curious as to whether you enjoyed writing it.

There's a kind of bitterness that comes through now and then about the research that you had to do for this one.

I would say I enjoyed it more looking back over it than in the process.

There was a kind of great literary endurance test to see how much of this kind of read when it was just really atrocious most of it.

I mean I had the idea when I was a younger man, you know, and I had more of my life in front of me

than I do now. So it was like, yeah, if I spent like 8, 9, 10 years, like reading

dictator books it will be fine. In the heady days of youth it seemed like a worthwhile challenge.

Obviously there are the kind of dictator books that were all familiar with,

...