Simon Callow

Farm animals drive out their masters and set out to govern on the principle that 'all animals are equal'. Fairly rapidly some animals become 'more equal than others'. A modern fable on the history of a revolution, with excellent excuses at every step of the descent into dictatorship for each perversion of the original ideas.

Simon Callow plunges headlong into Wagner's world to discover what it was like to be Wagner, and to be around one of music's most influential figures. The perfect introduction to the Master, a hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagner's music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music.

Two hundred years after his death, Dickens's work is more popular than ever. Theatre was central to his life, from his earliest years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth pubs, to his reluctant retirement from 'these garish lights' barely a year before his death. He wrote plays, he acted in them; he stage-managed them, all with fanatical perfectionism. Simon Callow explores this extraordinary theatrical core to Dickens in this short life of one of our greatest novelists.

As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved? Examining regimes and their rulers the world over and throughout history, from Roman Emperors to renaissance Popes, from Hannibal to Cesare di Borgia, Machievalli answers all these questions in a work of realpolitik that still has shrewd political lessons for today. 

As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved? Examining regimes and their rulers the world over and throughout history, from Roman Emperors to renaissance Popes, from Hannibal to Cesare di Borgia, Machievalli answers all these questions in a work of realpolitik that still has shrewd political lessons for today.