Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (Hardback)

'Applebaum's reflections on the anti-democratic pandemic sweeping our world offer an extraordinary mix of personal witness and dispassionate historical analysis.... It's unlikely that anyone will ever give us more sensitive or revealing insights on this question' - John Connelly, New Statesman

'Heretics make the best writers. ... Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right ... her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand.' - Nick Cohen, Observer

'Applebaum's progress ...has yielded an enviable supply of raw material for her narrative. She mines her sources doggedly....Twilight of Democracy is a rather penetrating work of ethnography' - Trevor Phillips, The Times

'this engrossing account ... is a political book; it is also intensely personal, and the more powerful for it.' - John Kampfner, Guardian

'This is an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War.' - David Goodhart, Literary Review

'Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today's authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone. ... critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks-and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author's views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. In the spirit of Julien Benda, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, Applebaum seeks to understand what makes the new right "more Bolshevik than Burkean."... A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities.' - Kirkus Reviews

'Anne Applebaum is a leading historian of communism and a penetrating investigator of contemporary politics. Here she sets her sights on the big question, one with which she herself has been deeply engaged in both Europe and America: how did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document, written with urgency, intelligence and understanding, is her answer.' - Timothy Snyder

'Friendships torn. Ideals betrayed. Alliances broken. In this, her most personal book, a great historian explains why so many of those who won the battles for democracy or have spent their lives proclaiming its values are now succumbing to liars, thugs and crooks. Analysis, reportage and memoir, Twilight of Democracy fearlessly tells the shameful story of a political generation gone bad.' - David Frum