The ultimate guide to the worst dictators in history: 64 profiles by 64 different historians, politicians and journalists compiled by leading political commentator Iain Dale

Were the signs that Putin is a ruthless dictator there all along? How should we deal with President Xi of China? It is time to seek warnings, and lessons, from history.

In The Dictators, Iain Dale brings together 64 essays by historians, academics, journalists and politicians about elected and unelected dictators, wartime and peacetime dictators, those driven by ideology and those with a reputation for sheer brutality. How did these tyrants, autocrats and despots seize power - and how did they exercise it? And how did they lose it? Very few dictators die peacefully in their own beds, after all.

Only by examining these figures from the 6th century BC to the present, from ancient Greece to present day Saudi Arabia, do patterns start to emerge. We can see the shared character traits, the common conditions, the patterns of behaviour that have enabled dictators to seize power - time and time again.

The Dictators is acutely relevant to world politics today: it is indeed a warning from history. Will we take heed? Or will history, in fact, teach us that history teaches us nothing?