How to Feed a Dictator

A devastatingly original look at the world's worst dictators, through the eyes of their personal chefs, by award-winning Polish author Witold Szablowski.



What is it like to cook for the most dangerous men in the world?



In this darkly funny and fascinating book, Witold Szablowski travels across four continents in search of the personal chefs of five dictators. From the savannahs of Kenya to the faded glamour of Havana, and the bombed-out streets of Baghdad, Szablowski finds the men and women who cooked fish soup for Saddam Hussein, roasted goat for Idi Amin and chopped papaya salad for Pol Pot. He reveals the strangeness of a job where a single culinary mistake could be fatal, but a well-seasoned dish could change your life. And in doing so, he lifts the veil on what life is like at the very heart of power.



Witold Szabłowski is an award-winning Polish journalist and the critically-acclaimed author of books including Dancing Bears and How to Feed a Dictator. Szabłowski lives in Warsaw.



Mixing bold journalism with bolder allegories, Mr Szablowski teaches us with witty persistence that we must desire freedom rather than simply expect it



This book tells all that we know about the power of good suppers, whoever they are fed to



Riveting, and utterly convinces in its thesis that "20th-century history as seen from the kitchen" is worth our attention



How To Feed A Dictator offers a beguiling mix of the dark and the comic, combining fancy cuisine with torture and genocide. Its tone is reminiscent of Armando Iannucci's recent movie The Death Of Stalin, in which the absurd and the monstrous, the funny and the horrifying are so entwined as to be indivisible



A fascinating collection of essays - part oral history, part reportage - by Polish journalist Witold Szablowski... For some of these chefs, it was hard to see their employers as anything but ordinary human beings, however flawed, until it was too late. Maybe you can't see monstrosity in its full monstrousness when you're making breakfast for it every day