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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the FT columnist Gideon Rachman,

whose new book is The Age of the Strongman, how the cult of the leader threatens democracy around the world.

And it's an even more timely book, I think, than it was probably when it was conceived.

But, Gideon, start with, can you say what you mean by a strong man

and particularly why we are in a distinctive age of the strong man

rather than seeing them as a sort of hardy perennial?

Yeah, no, I think that's a very good question.

It's one I had to sort of pose to myself before I got going on the book.

Because, as you say, I mean,

probably throughout human history, people have lived in autocratic regimes, you know, most of the

time people aren't living in democracies. And there have always been strongman leaders around.

But I think that we are, the reason I think we're in a new age of the strong man is I think

there was a period

for maybe about 20, 30 years, starting in the late 17s, when this style of autocratic, very

personality-driven leadership went out of fashion, at least in the major power centres, so that

I think it stops in China with the death of Mao. China moves towards a more

collective style of leadership, stops in Russia, Soviet Union, after the death of Stalin, the

Communist Party, for all its faults, was a sort of collective leadership. And in India, you know,

you have in the globalization era kind of rather laid back leaders, people like

Manmahen Singh and so on and certainly in the West. We had strong leaders. We had a Thatcher figure

...