Albright for Putin: He's smart, but cold as a reptile.

My parents were many continental Europeans, and I had no sisters at first. I felt isolated. While Hitler launched the campaign, we landed every night in the basement where everyone was sleeping. ”

From Nottingham Hill, the family left central London in Walton-Thames, where they shared a house “with several other checks”. The bombs also fell there, but she enjoyed “every minute” of this part of her childhood. “I went to school and spent a lot of time in the air raid shelters singing a hundred green bottles hanging on the wall”. It was less terrible than it could be because my “parents had a ability to make the abnormals look normal”.

Wartime Britons were very hospitable “” to one point. “Britianics would say: Sorry your country was taken by a terrible dictator. You're welcome here. What can we do to help you, and when you are going home? ”

Her father, diplomat Joseph Corbel, was with the Czech government in exile. She remembers him refusing to take refuge from bombers, because he had to finish a BBC broadcast.

After Hitler's defeat, Corbel took his family back to his homeland, believing that Czechoslovakia would rebuild itself as a democracy, but the country was soon seized by another form of totalitarianism. After a coup supported by the Soviets installed a communist satellite regime in 1948, the family escaped again, this time seeking asylum in America and settling in Colorado.

In America, people welcomed immigrants by saying: “Sorry your country was taken from a terrible system. You're welcome here. What can we do to help you, and when will you become a citizen? “It pauses slightly, then adds:” And that was different for America at that time “.

Albright's early work as a journalist and a foreign policy researcher drew him to politics. In 1978, she sat at the National Security Council when Jimmy Carter was president and then represented the United Nations as the country's ambassador.

In 1997, Bill Clinton made him a secretary of state in the highest government office, accessible under the U.S. Constitution by someone who was not born in America. She was the first woman to lead US foreign policy.

During the four years as the leader of America's diplomacy, its life and views were again formed by encounters with tyranny. She engaged in Kim Jong-il, the father of the current North Korean Archbishop and found it, recalls in her new, kind, kind book and normal <x0->normality for someone whose father's birthday is celebrated every year as” Sunday “

“Sl Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian autocrat, “did not match the stereotype of a fascist nigger” and enjoyed the innocent “” even though his security forces tried to make Kosovo's ethnic cleansing.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's late ruler, was “very charismatic” and initially seemed to keep his promise of his country, when he replaced “a group of tired and old people who were very elitist”.

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan first came to power in Turkey, it was a refreshing change from the rule of the <x0 people living in big homes, or from time to time in the army”. These people first had a feeling for the working class and then power went to the head. ”

A chapter of her new book concerns Vladimir Putin, which she found to be “Alb. He has played a weak hand really well. He has a bigger agenda that will separate us from our allies and starts with dividing Central and Eastern Europe from Western Europe “.

She admits that the West was slow to realize that the Russians felt totally humiliated after the Cold War and willing to surrender to a powerful nationalist force that promised to make them big again. She recalls a Russian man complaining: “We were a superpower and now we're Bangladesh with” rockets. Putin, she tells me, “has seen himself as the savior of that man”.

The book is a call for anxiety about the global revival of authoritarianism and a lament over the decay of the liberal, internationalist policy in which Albright has dedicated her career.

It quotes Primo Levi “Every age has its fascism” and makes its case with observations of the autocrats she has dealt with and the varied stories of past dictators and the horrors they have released. The gallery of a devil's portrait includes Benito Mussolini, the original frontist and Adolf Hitler, the most destructive and then Donald Trump.

I'm not calling Trump a fascist,” she says. However, it seems like you're doing everything except when you put it in the same society as the historical fascists in a book that wants to ring a <x2 callback” for a fascist revival.

It often encourages the reader to make connections between the president of the United States and past dictatorships. It reminds us who first coined the phrase of Trumpian “said the swamp”.

She quotes Hitler as talking about the secret to his success: “I will show you what has led me to the position I have achieved. Our political problems seemed complicated. The German people couldn't do anything of them... I... reduced them to simpler conditions. The measure understood and followed.

In her book Trump is a bad powder. It labels it “the first anti-democratic president in modern American history”. They, the Trumpians, who know their history, can say that the former American presidents are accused of being enemies of democracy, including some who have become the most respected holders of the office.

Trump is different, she insists. Look at his attacks on liberal society institutions, while the one on Twitter beats the judiciary and the media. Red “,” says Albright. It was Stalin who spoke of the press as the enemy of the people.

I also think Trump acts as if it is above the law.” He stands shameless, she says. He threatens to imprison political competitors. That autocratic admiration like Putin thus encourages global significance for authoritarianism. Notice, too, how Trump exploits a mob.