Snyder's beautifully weighted book is the perfect clear-eyed antidote to deliberate philistinism. The most coherent manifesto on confronting Trump. Timely agitprop, it offers some relief from Trump anxiety disorder. Urgent, indignant, winningly ragged in execution, On Tyranny is in the best tradition of polemical pamphlets. On Tyranny will help you keep going for the next four years, or however long it takes. If more people follow Snyder's injunctions to read newspapers, avoid falling for contrived online "scandals", make friends across national boundaries and remember professional ethics then the world will indeed be a better place. He is undoubtedly a scholar of great distinction and authority. a memorable work that is grounded in history yet imbued with the fierce urgency of what now. On Tyranny is a slim book that fits alongside your pocket constitution and feels only slightly less vital. This American writer leaves us with no illusions about ourselves Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. History can familiarise, and it can warn. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. History does not repeat, but it does instruct. 'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer 'A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close' Rachel Maddow
A controversial, timely intervention in world affairs from one of the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century
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