Colossally bad taste

Everyone loves a good dictator, at least at a distance. Dictators exert the same horror and fascination that snakes have for some people; Latin American literature, for example, would be very much the poorer without them. It seems that we cannot ever know too much about their daily lives, for their arbitrary power over life and death seems to give a wider significance to the most trivial detail of their existence.

Peter York, whom the blurb describes as ‘Britain’s original style guru’, has had the clever idea of making a picture book of dictators’ homes, 16 of them in all. The premise of the book is that by their décor shall ye know them. The pictures largely speak for themselves, but are accompanied by the style guru’s commentary, written in an arch, mid-Atlantic, facetious joke-a-minute style that often passes for wit, and that implies that the author has achieved final truth where aesthetic judgment is concerned.