Kershaw considers three Russian leaders — Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev — in the dozen political leaders featured in ‘Personality and Power’.

When a chef wins a Michelin star, that considerable achievement can mean that the celebrated restaurant limits its offerings to a take-it-or-leave-it tasting menu. This turns customers into cultural supplicants denied the choice a paying customer anticipates.

However, the limitation may help save the sanity of those in a Michelin-burdened kitchen and help to monetise the fleeting 15 seconds of fame. If historian Ian Kershaw were a chef, he might need to wear a back brace to stand straight — like one of those ursine Russian veterans with a stone-and-a-half of campaign medals pinned to his chest, he would need a scaffold to defy gravity.

Long regarded as one of the English-speaking world’s foremost and most reliable voices on the social history of the last century, his specialty is Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Two of his books — Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis — have long been regarded as benchmarks in that well-harrowed field.

That today’s Ireland has, or had, 18 Michelin-star restaurants shows how the heft of history, the force of dynamic ambition, and the potential unleashed by Giffen goods-scale vanity and unprecedented affluence reshape our world. In Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe Kershaw focuses on the personalities of a dozen political leaders — only political, so no Picasso, John Lennon, or Karol Wojtyla — and how their emotional and psychological make-up, their social formation, and education influenced their behaviour, standards, methods, and coloured their legacies.

He shows how personality influenced conscience — or if it did at all. In too many cases it did not because the individuals, once unquestioned power was achieved, imagined themselves divinely ordained to lead their country and deliver their vision no matter how blood-spattered their manifesto became.

Ironically, this from-heaven impulse seemed most unshakeable among the atheists in Kershaw’s dozen. The scale of that objective, and the all-too-frequent almost unlimited horrors inflicted on humanity by some of his subjects, means that the book is more a tasting menu than a comprehensive analysis; it scratches the veneer of 12 pillar figures, and like many tasting menus, it hardly sates the appetite.

But then that may be Kershaw’s ultimate — possibly unintended — objective. If it is, he succeeds splendidly. As he approaches his 80th birthday in April, Kershaw cannot but wonder, like the rest of the sentient world, if the whole deck of cards we fondly imagine as a settled civilisation is set to topple into the dystopian abyss one more time — and this book shows all too clearly what happens when despots rage.

It is a timely, even if unintended, wake-up call for a liberal world almost dazzled, and almost sated, by its own achievements.

The dozen, all but one male — the exception is obvious — have common traits. Energy, courage, focus, one kind of charisma or another but one common characteristic is defining: a cold ruthlessness that — deliberately — kept their opponents and supporters awake, sweaty, and fretful at night.

Kershaw considers three Russian leaders — Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev. Lenin was, even during his relatively short presence, ruthless, but his successor Stalin brought that detachment to a primal level.

Just a few examples — there are all too many — his forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s was more than bloody. The “ultra-violent, brutally uncompromising way in which it was implemented bore Stalin’s hallmark. The numbers executed, deported or imprisoned has been estimated at four to five million”.

The subsequent famine, a direct legacy of imposed policy, took another five million lives. During his “Great Terror”, around 700,000 Russians were executed, many of them soon-to-be-needed army officers.

Recoiling, as we naturally might, from that barbarous history is a kind of denial, a weakness that facilitates the Kremlin incumbent’s new terror. Thankfully, any imagining how the satanic ambitions of the other mega-tyrant in the dozen — Hitler — might have been stymied without Soviet arms and blood is unnecessary even if today’s events make that distancing imprudent.

This, it seems to me, the core message of Kershaw’s latest book, a message that is not always pessimistic. That Stalin’s culture of geriatric and savage autocracy was, even if briefly, interrupted by Gorbachev’s humanity must be a victory for our better angels — even if Gorbachev praised Putin for rescuing Russia from the drunkard Yeltsin. He was “more critical of Putin as the descent into outright authoritarianism acceler

ated”, backing him even over the annexation of Crimea in 2014. How interesting it might be to hear how that view might have modified.

Though Kershaw warns against giving too much weight to the childhood traumas, physical or emotional, endured by at least four of his subjects — Stalin, Churchill, Tito, Franco, and to a lesser if different degree Thatcher — it is hard not to ignore familial dysfunction as a clutching-at-straws explanation for atrocities as aperitifs to politics.

Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975, is a perfect example. A reactionary brute, he unleashed Stalin-grade terror on compatriots.

Spain’s civil war, tragically, makes ours look like an Áras an Uachtaráin garden party. Around half a million lives were lost and an estimated 150,000 civilians were executed by one side or the other.

Kershaw reminds us that around 20,000 Republicans were put to death by Franco after the war — a war he might not have won without support from Germany and Italy, interventions that offer a pertinent context for Ukraine today.

A celebratory carnival in Madrid in May 1939 heard Franco warn against “the Jewish spirit which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism”.

The culmination of that victory festival was a solemn high mass to mark Spanish Catholicism’s welcome for the Facist victory, a relief widely echoed in this country.

This was not the only instance of Catholicism being on the wrong side of history with one of Kershaw’s dozen.

Italy’s Mussolini, a tinpot but nonetheless dangerous dictator, was described by Pope Pius XI as a man sent by “providence” to free the country from the false doctrine of liberalism.

It must be another victory for our better angels that today’s Spain is a bulwark of the European Union, a status it has achieved by confronting its past in ways we have yet to consider. Were Franco Irish it is unimaginable that he would have been disinterred from a national monument and moved to a far less dramatic, private setting.

Kershaw shows a particular professional detachment in his analysis of Churchill’s legacy. He acknowledges flaws but celebrates his role in at first defying and later defeating Hitler.

Almost uniquely, he regrets the mythology of exceptionalism built around the war leader as he sees it at the catalyst for the fantastic delusion that drove Brexit and animates much of the Conservative Party’s regression towards destructive, insular tribalism.

If there is a weakness in this excellent, provocative book it is that Kershaw, like a Michelin star chef or one of the dictators he writes about, seems to have moved beyond the reach of the normality that might flow from an assertive editor.

Though he may not have been indulged to the extent that Stalin’s biographer Stephen Kotkin has been — two door-stopper instalments published and a third in preparation — the intervention of a skilled, hard-nosed editor might make this book even more accessible which, as our world seems increasingly overshadowed by a darkening sense of déjà vu, would be a noble objective.

That Ireland is mentioned but once — in half a sentence considering Thatcher’s abject failure in confronting the North’s Troubles — seems proportionate and yet another reason to sing that old ballad, ‘Thank God We’re Surrounded by Water’.

Maybe after an indulgent visit to one of the 18 Michelin restaurants and certainly before the second edition of this book is forced to include, however regrettably, a fourth Russian leader.

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