Real Dictators

In Mein Kampf, he sort of says that he was sort of lower middle class and that his father was a clerk. And this was completely incorrect.

In Mein Kampf, he'll describe years of scratching out a living as a starving artist, first in the city of Linz, then in Vienna.

He starts Mein Kampf with this kind of very fact that he is being born on the borderlands of those two countries.

Duvalier was under threat almost from the start.

Fortunately for him, most of the attempts, coup attempts if you like, were comic opera affairs.

And this one was particularly so because there were only eight of them involved.

There are some close to Duvalier who claim that after that illness, he became a different person.

It was almost as if he'd become something else, that he'd been transformed, if you like, by the combination of his physical frailty and his increasing realisation that he needed to be something other than a human being to survive as president of Haiti.

The rise of Castro and the Cuban revolution was an absolute boon for Duvalier because it took the heat off him in terms of the State Department worrying about the Caribbean.

He was reportedly in a coma for quite a long period, and there is some evidence, though it's very hard to prove, that this may have created some brain damage or some long-lasting change in his behaviour.

He was widely read, but he wasn't an intellectual. He didn't come from an academic background.

He had a church education, which was very wide, but he didn't have that particular grain of academic intellectualism that Lenin and Trotsky had. He didn't have that university education.

He didn't have the Viennese coffee house background, and I think it made him feel inferior because his skills were so practical. He was a very pragmatic man as well as intelligent, but that is different from being intellectual.

He didn't want everybody particularly his family to know what was going on because millions of people were starving millions of people were sent into exile

the family were not necessarily revolutionaries of that ilk they wanted to change society they wanted the ideals of socialism to come into play but not at the extent of the deaths of millions of people they would have regarded this annihilation of the peasant classes as a betrayal of their ideals

He was widely read, but he wasn't an intellectual. He didn't come from an academic background.

He had a church education, which was very wide, but he didn't have that particular grain of academic intellectualism that Lenin and Trotsky had. He didn't have that university education. He didn't have the Viennese coffee house background, and I think it made him feel inferior because his skills were so practical. He was a very pragmatic man as well as intelligent, but that is different from being intellectual.

He didn't want everybody particularly his family to know what was going on because millions of people were starving millions of people were sent into exile the family were not necessarily revolutionaries of that ilk they wanted to change society they wanted the ideals of socialism to come into play but not at the extent of the deaths of millions of people they would have regarded this annihilation of the peasant classes as a betrayal of their ideals

One of the things that Marie-France Bocassa writes about in her memoir is that one of the challenges that those kids faced was that their father had multiple wives and that the relationships among the children and some of these wives were not always easy and that some of those stepmothers could be, in some cases, much more brutal than the father.

She paints an interesting portrait of her father as someone who was a strict disciplinarian, had very high standards for his children and could be quite dictatorial also in his home life, but also someone who was very, very important to her as she was growing up.

He puts pen to paper, outlining his ideals in a book called The Philosophy of the Revolution.

Gaddafi idolises Nasser, reveres Nasser's book and can recite whole speeches from memory.

Dr Sebastian Faber is an historian of the Spanish Civil War and author of the book Exhuming Franco.

Dr. Antonio Casola Sanchez is an historian and author of Franco, the biography of the myth.

Sir Paul Preston is an historian and author of the biography Franco.

Dr. Peter Anderson, historian and author of Franco's Famine, explains.

James Wiley is author of Gring and Gring, Hitler's henchman and his anti-Nazi brother.

Rosamund Richardson is a journalist and author of The Long Shadow Inside Stalin's Family.

James Pearson is an awardwinning journalist and author of North Korea Confidential.