‘I’ve been a public speaker for 16 years and even I learned a lot from How To Speak So Others Listen. This book will help you find your voice and then teach you how to use it. I highly recommend it to anyone’ Sofie Hagen

‘Cuts through and clarifies exactly what you need to know to deliver a talk that makes a difference’ Roman Krznaric , TED speaker and author of The Good Ancestor

Maryam Pasha has worked with hundreds of high profile speakers, including philanthropists, Nobel-prize-winning academics and business leaders, as a storytelling coach and curator for TEDxLondon. In this book, she shows how anyone can learn to become a better public speaker by harnessing the power of storytelling.

Human connection starts with stories and being able to tell them. Being compelling, clear and impactful when you speak is a skill everyone needs to develop, to stay relevant and effect change in the workplace, your community and beyond. It’s something that many activists and people engaged in social change already know well: you can have all the data and facts in the world, but it’s stories that move the needle. Stories have the power to build empathy, help to shift mindsets and open up new possibilities.

How To Speak So Others Listen provides a practical toolkit for anyone and everyone who wants to get better at public speaking, whatever that looks like for you. This book will also help you to believe that what you have to say is worth saying, and show you how to find the power of your own unique voice, to bring about positive change in your own life and the world around you.

‘Expert, compassionate and often hilarious guidance on how to find your own voice, whoever you are’ David Lan

‘Maryam Pasha turns everything you think you know about communication on its head . . . a practical and masterful guide to effective communication.’ Julia Shaw

‘How To Speak So Others Listen is a must read for anyone wanting to learn how to communicate with humanity and joy. I love her advice and empathetic approach on how to share personal stories with the world.’ Jamie Windust

In this captivating history of language and power, speechwriter Guy Doza sets out how dictators have seized and maintained control of states through their mastery of oratory.

He shows how, despite their fearsome reputation, strongmen such as Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were surprisingly subtle and skillful in their speeches. Less notorious female tyrants (have you heard of Ranavalona I, the ‘Mad Queen of Madagascar’ who killed half of her subjects, or Chairman Mao’s murderous wife Jiang Qing?) were differently but equally manipulative.

As well as revealing the wordplay of each of 18 despots, Doza analyses the rhetorical techniques they shared. How Attila the Hun and Napoleon Bonaparte showered flattery on their troops and deliberately aggrandised their enemies. And how two violent 20th Century leaders, Zaire’s President Mobuto and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, portrayed themselves as the father of their respective nations to nurture their ethos.

For, irrespective of time, geography and language, dictators and their allies consistently reuse the same methods of persuasion. In a ‘post-truth’ age where simplified messages overpower sophisticated ones, The Language of Evil equips readers to spot the same tricks and techniques being used today by tomorrow’s would-be dictators.

Reviews

‘The handbook that humanity needs right now – not simply to understand the dangerous rhetoric of demagogues, but how to resist it.’ – Terry Szuplat, former policy speechwriter for President Barack Obama and author of Say It Well.

‘Whatever happens in the street, the populist mobs have to be fired up first. That’s where words come in. Guy Doza’s Language of Evil is a fascinating analysis of the speechifying that empowers tyranny through the malign careers of eighteen dictators, from Julius Caesar to Saddam Hussein.

‘Gun, clubs, camps and torture chambers come next, but without words to set things going, these despots and their current successors would be nowhere.’

‘Sticks and stones?says the old rhyme. Don’t believe a word of it.’ – Jonathon Green, Lexicographer