Dictatorship

Why state bureaucracy is crucial to our happiness

13 July 2024 9:00 am

With politicians increasingly sabotaging the machinery of government worldwide, our only protection lies in the civil service, judiciary, police and security services

Zimbabwe’s politics satirised: Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo, reviewed

2 April 2022 9:00 am

NoViolet Bulawayo’s first novel We Need New Names,shortlisted for the Booker in 2013, was a charming, tender gem, suffused with…

An anti-Stalinist painting of the 1940s shows the tyrant’s face composed of starving Russians, against a backdrop of the Gulag

A decade of famine and purges: the murderous 1930s under Stalin

11 November 2017 9:00 am

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler.…

Twenty things I will ban when I am elected your Dictator For Life in 2016

12 December 2015 9:00 am

  Things I am going to ban when, by popular acclaim, I am elected your Dictator For Life in 2016.…

Actors from the Belarus Free Theatre during a performance of ‘Being Harold Pinter’ at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, 2009

Theatre and transgression in Europe’s last dictatorship

7 November 2015 9:00 am

Juan Holzmann goes underground in Minsk with the Belarus Free Theatre

The museum which once displayed Enver Hoxha’s pyjamas now houses a pro-democracy radio station

30 May 2015 9:00 am

Albania is a small country of 2.7 million people, wedged within the Balkan peninsula. Separated from both Greece and Italy…

The comedy club theory of dictatorship

8 February 2014 9:00 am

The comedy club theory of dictatorship