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Go to spectator.com.uk slash summer.

Hello. co.uk slash summer. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm joined by, well, one of my predecessors,

Ferdinand Mount, who's been political editor of the Spectator,

has been the editor of the TLS,

headed Mrs Thatcher's policy unit at Downing Street, and is now the author of a new book called

Big Caesars and Little Caesars, How They Rise and How They Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson.

Ferdie, hi. What is a Big Caesar and what's a little Caesar and what's the difference between them?

The difference is in the degree of their power mania and their ruthlessness.

So the big Caesars are the great beasts of history.

And the Little Caesars, as the name was first used of Chicago gangsters, are the, well,

what's Rudy called the Tin Pot dictators who operate at a lower level. But the thesis of my book is

that although the consequences of the Big Caesars and the Little Caesars are vastly different,

they tend to operate on much the same techniques.

And so this book is running through a few of the tricks of their trade.

The original Caesar didn't invent the concept of Caesarism, did he?

It's one of the discoveries in this book.

When did we start to think about Caesarism?

...