Real Dictators

Alex Fontoune's on man is the author of Fallen Idles, 12 statues that made history.

Saddam even grew quite a similar moustache to Stalin so you know kind of adopted that look a little bit and very very much bought into that same social tradition of portraying himself as a benevolent uncle as this kind of kindly leader as this big brother without irony.

Professor Juman Kuba is author of the First Evidence, a memoir of life in Iraq on the Saddam Hussein.

This tag Saddam and his gang came to power they took Iraq into a path of destruction and a path of chaos and a path of death, of sectarianism, of wars upon wars upon wars. I call it the biggest crime of the previous century.

James Hyder is the former Middle East Bureau chief for the times and author of The Spiders of Allah.

I don't think he was really afraid of anything. I saw him once in the whole time I was there. I was covering his trial after he was captured. He looked around at the bulletproof mirror that I was behind and he must have guessed there were people behind there and he just gave us this utter look of contempt.

The earliest known work of literature, the epic of Kilgamesh, was written here almost 4,000 years ago.

He also devours the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, attracted perhaps by the author's unsentimental Makizmo.

Oscar Scafidi is a travel writer, risk consultant and international educator and the author of the Brat Guide to Equatorial Guinea so Macias was born at a time of great upheaval for the Fang tribe in Ectro Guinea's mainland basically the Spanish had only just decided that they were going to extend their colonial control to the interior of this territory that they already had so the Spanish had already been pretty well established on Bioco Island and they had some presence on the coast but not much so it wasn't till about 1926 that they actually got an army together and decided we need to head into the jungle into the interior and take control of this place

Paul Kenyon is a BAFTA winning journalist for BBC panorama and the author of dictator land the men who stole Africa when you look at Macias's younger years so little it's written about it I mean so little it's written about Equatorial Guinea in this era anyway we have Macias growing up in the Catholic church going to a Catholic school there would have been an awful lot of rules and regulations and a lot of discipline this incorporation into European customs and traditions is the result of family tragedy but as we shall see it will give the young boy the inside track on the colonelists this will prove a crucial advantage in the years to come

He grabs a tourist guide to Britain, part of the popular Biddaka series and orders the destruction of scenic destinations featured in it, York, Exeter, Bath, Norwich, Kentepri.

Hitler has written a new book, they say. My New Failure, My New Errors.

Many thanks to Jim Davidson For more about his epic story Read The Ledge An inspirational story of friendship and survival By Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughn

It's controversial whether or not there was a helicopter. Did he die? That's not in question. He was killed. He was assassinated. Who did it? I honestly do not know.

There were attempts to name me as being involved, but it didn't work, he concludes smugly.

It's just inconclusive. Noriega's involvement is inconclusive. Now that can be because Noriega is a superior chameleon, and part of the plan would be a plausible deniability and being able to distance yourself.

I don't think we're ever going to know for sure, but the suspicion is very, very strong.

It's very convenient to make Noriega the scapegoat of everything. So everything gets centralised in his image.

I'm certain that he did a lot of bad things, but I think the main problem is that there has been a massive effort to kind of take him outside of the context and just be like, this guy is the devil.

When I think it should be analysed in not only Panama's context, Central America and the whole hemisphere, the whole world.

He sent the German Air Force over London to drop that famous piece of literature, my last appeal to reason by Adolf Hitler.

Douglas Rogers has closely examined Mugabe's final days in power. He is the author of Two Weeks in November, the astonishing untold story of the operation that toppled Mugabe.

I'd been on a trip in Mozambique, researching a book.

I returned to attend that march.

I'm making no secrets. I'm not a war reporter or conflict reporter. That stuff terrifies me, that a wife and young children, this thing is not going to go down the way we've thought it is. And things are going to get very ugly.

Less than 24 hours later, Douglas Rogers is on a plane out of the country.

Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort, a memoir of Zimbabwe, grew up on his parents' farm near the Mozambique border.

So in taking out white farmers, he was doing two things. He was targeting a white minority, but he was also destroying black farm workers in that community.

And that was, to me, that's the overlooked story of that time.

Lenin was in there with his notebooks and his pens, reading and reading and reading, to create a book called Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which was a very important text in terms of his future policy.

Vladimir's favourite book in his youth is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, that landmark work of anti-slavery.

Dr James Ryan is senior lecturer in modern Russian history at Cardiff University, and author of Lenin's Terror, the ideological origins of early Soviet state violence.

Victor Sebastian is an historian of Eastern Europe, Russia and communism, and author of Lenin the Dictator.

Professor Catherine Merridale is an expert on Russian history and author of Lenin on the Train.