Evil is a fact of life. We can see it, not only in the reigns of Stalin and Hitler, but also in everyday crimes like murder, rape and assault -- quite apart from the millions of lives brutalized by political or religious oppression, poverty, disease and starvation ...

A study of the manifestation of evil in 15 women spanning over 2000 years.

The preferred method of torture of Vlad Dracul, 15th-century prince of Wallachia, was to attach a horse to each of the victim's legs as a sharpened stake was gradually forced into his body; Vlad also enjoyed scalping, skinning and boiling alive. The 14th-century Mongol warlord Tamerlane once ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls from those that his army had beheaded... In 101 World Heroes Simon Sebag Montefiore selected his ultimate heroes and heroines. Now he offers his readers the other - darker - side of the coin. Monsters presents, in chronological order, grimly fascinating profiles of 101 notorious and profoundly sinister individuals whose actions have one thing in common - they have had a baleful and blood-soaked impact on the annals of world history. From Attila the Hun to Basil the Bulgar Slayer, from Pedro the Cruel to Ivan the Terrible, and from Richard III to Saddam Hussein, Monsters is a devilishly compelling gallery of history's greatest ghouls, including: Caligula, Richard III, Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Charles Manson, Herman Cortes, Adolf Hitler, Al Capone, Laventi Beria, Lucrezia Borgia, Nicolae Ceausescu, Vlad the Impaler, Saddam Hussein, Simon de Montfort, Pablo Escobar, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin, Attila, Josef Mengele, Heinrich Himmler, Mao Zedong, Osama bin Laden, Kim Il Sung, Slobodan Milosevic, Empress Cixi, Tomas de Torquemeda.

Presented with accounts of genocide and torture, we ask how people could bring themselves to commit such horrendous acts. A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, Evil Men confronts atrocity head-on—how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped. Drawing on firsthand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), James Dawes leads us into the frightening territory where soldiers perpetrated some of the worst crimes imaginable: murder, torture, rape, medical experimentation on living subjects. Transcending conventional reporting and commentary, Dawes’s narrative weaves together unforgettable segments from the interviews with consideration of the troubling issues they raise. Telling the personal story of his journey to Japan, Dawes also lays bare the cultural misunderstandings and ethical compromises that at times called the legitimacy of his entire project into question. For this book is not just about the things war criminals do. It is about what it is like, and what it means, to befriend them. Do our stories of evil deeds make a difference? Can we depict atrocity without sensational curiosity? Anguished and unflinchingly honest, as eloquent as it is raw and painful, Evil Men asks hard questions about the most disturbing capabilities human beings possess, and acknowledges that these questions may have no comforting answers.

History is blighted by the deeds of many men - Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin, Papa Doc Adolf Hitler, Al Capone, the Kray twins and many others. Their cruelty and violence changed the face of the human race and certainly gave it cause to examine its own nature more closely.

This is a study of the manifestation of true evil in men throughout humanistory. This text contains in-depth profiles of these, the men who, forheir own sinister purposes, have used their power to torture, kill, maim andradicate millions of people.

"I have committed many acts of cruelty and had an incalculable number of men killed, never knowing whether what I did was right. But I am indifferent to what people think of me." - Genghis Khan A spine-chilling chronicle of dictators and their crimes against humanity, Tyrants introduces the most bloodthirsty madmen - and women - ever to wield power over their unfortunate fellow human beings. From Herod the Great, persecutor of the infant Jesus, to Adolf Hitler, mass murderer and instigator of the most devastating war the world has ever known, this book examines history's most infamous despots and tells in vivid detail the story of the lives they led, their ruthless climb to the top and the destruction and sorrow they left in their wake. Unflinching in its coverage, Tyrants is a gripping and compelling portrait of the darker side of politics and power, revealing the strange and grisly stories behind the world's most infamous autocrats.