Dictators like to present themselves as superhuman, even godly, but, for leaving or not, they

all have basic needs just like the rest of us. A tyrant still needs to eat, for example.

The role of a personal chef to a dictator is a fascinating one. What can their memories

and stories tell us about dictators appetites? And what portrait do they paint of the

granality of evil? Noise a right-aduncan barit, sat down to talk with

Vittel Saplovsky, author of How to Feed a Dictator. Saddam Hussein, Iliamin, Enbehadja,

Fidel Castro and Pol Pot through the eyes of their cooks.

Vittel, you travelled to four different continents to speak to the men and women who cooked for

some of the world's most brutal dictators. Was it hard tracking those chefs down and persuading

them to talk to you? Hello, Duncan. Good afternoon. Good evening to everyone who's listening

to us. Thank you for having me. It was so hard that if I knew how hard it might be, I would

actually never start writing this book. And the research took me more than three years.

And making those guys talk was probably the biggest achievement that I've ever faced

in my work. The main reason for that was that the chefs of dictators they know they are

still alive because they knew they shouldn't talk too much. And they knew that the silence

was their quarantine of life. And the silence were their insurance. And they have this habit

of not telling too much. They have this habit of not talking to everyone about your work

or your previous work, even if the dictator is dead for, let's say, 20 or 25 years, they

still remain living in this silence because they have this habit. So, yeah, it was extremely

hard firstly to find them secondly to make them talk. I was interested. I think it comes across

very strongly in the book, the close relationship that they had. But in some ways, as you say,

still have with the dictators even after death. I mean, they're quite, in some cases, unapologetic.

...