Rulers

A crown is the most public job there is. These are the lives of people who ruled: how they came to power, what they did with it, and what it cost them and everyone around them.

Cleopatra, the first of her line to speak Egyptian, bet her kingdom on Caesar and then on Antony. She chose death over being paraded through Rome, and Rome wrote her story. Saladin, a Kurdish officer’s son from Tikrit, took Jerusalem without a massacre and gave away so much that nothing was left to pay for his funeral. Suleiman the Magnificent, a poet-sultan, married a woman who had been enslaved, then ordered the deaths of his oldest friend and two of his sons. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal and spent his last seven years as his son’s prisoner, within sight of it. Queen Victoria was raised under a system that never let her be alone, became queen at 18 and wore black for almost 40 years.

One life on this shelf is here as a warning. Adolf Hitler was twice rejected by the Vienna art academy and slept in a men’s hostel. He went on to seize Germany, launch the deadliest war in history and drive the Holocaust. We tell his story to understand how it happened, never to admire it.