The Dictator's Wife: The gripping BBC Two Between the Covers book club pick

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Elena Ceausescu: Doctor Horroris. Youtube, 21 Aug. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSoxcc6ZPoI. In her heyday Popa, we are told, introduced an all-female staff to her factory long before “girl power” became a rallying cry. She palled around with Ronald Reagan, Paul Newman and Saddam Hussein, and was a particular favourite of the British queen. She is described as “a hypnotic blend of Joan of Arc and Imelda Marcos; both goddess and she-devil, princess and tyrant, martyr and uber-bitch”. Eventually, Elena became the head of Romania's Institute for Chemistry. But that was not enough: Elena wanted every chemical institute in the country to come under one central institute in Bucharest, with herself at the helm. She wanted to be called Professor Doctor Engineer, and she found no opposition at the Romanian Academy, since resistance was both futile and dangerous.

Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever — except she was a Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever — except she was a

Did Berry develop sympathy for dictators’ wives in writing Popa’s character? “How do you make your way in a man’s world? If you can’t have power yourself, you have to go adjacent to it . These women are playing for the highest stakes. If they lose power, sometimes they’re executed. It’s this bitter tooth-and-nail fight for survival while also maintaining serene perfection and femininity,” she says. With Anisa dead, Makhlouf had lost his protector. The Syria Trust now took over the charity Makhlouf had used to curry favour in the Alawite heartlands. The government put Syriatel into receivership. Makhlouf’s bank accounts were frozen and Asma’s people installed on the boards of his enterprises. Her mother, Sahar, had ambitious plans for Asma. Her own great-uncle had helped Hafez Assad seize power. Sahar used this connection to get a job at Syria’s embassy in London. She was also keen to promote a match between Asma and Bashar, Hafez’s second son, according to Sam Dagher, author of "Assad Or We Burn the Country”. The two met several times when Bashar was a gangly medical student in London in the 1990s.It’s the personality cults versus the quite brutish figures that they actually were,” Berry remarks. “Elena liked to present herself as a scientist but couldn’t recognise basic chemistry formulas. That didn’t stop her getting an honorary doctorate from the Royal Society of Chemistry; there’s a campaign at the moment to get her stripped of them.”

Banker, princess, warlord: the many lives of Asma Assad Banker, princess, warlord: the many lives of Asma Assad

It’s a man’s world but these women are married to the men who make this world. I wanted to explore that duality because they’re at the eye of power but it’s slightly off to the left. They’re not paid. Their role often isn’t clear,” Berry says. As Behr explains in his history of the Ceaucescus' reign of terror, Mircea Corcioveci, one of the top scientists at the Institute, eventually discovered that Elena "didn't know what a chromatograph was and didn't recognize the formula for sulfuric acid," which was "taught to first-year chemistry students" (141). Ultimately, she became Chair of the National Council for Science and Technology and controlled all scientific research in the country, although she knew nothing about it.The legal defence team for the former First Lady, who is on trial for a myriad of corruption charges and faces the death penalty if found guilty, includes two Yanussian expats, both of whom have been selected for the case based upon their nationality – by the former First Lady. This is a complex story of displacement, both at the national and the personal level. It’s fraught with fear, of the sort that is unknown to those of us who have not lived under a communist rule. The author has recreated this sense of dark urgency, it descends over you while reading like a suffocation as you feel the terror of living with the secrets of the past, secrets that are still too dangerous to reveal. The charm offensive worked. Just months after Hariri’s assassination, the New York Times asked whether they represented “the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion”. “I was enchanted,” says a Syrian diplomat now in exile, who organised a European tour for the pair. “She’s lovable the moment you meet her. He’s different to other dictators in the Middle East. He looks modern and sophisticated. That’s what makes him so dangerous.” The "trial" that sealed the Ceausecus' fate was perhaps the perfect foil for the decades of falsification and fraud that defined Elena's scientific career. Behr calls the proceedings "farcical" and it is clear that the prosecutors were performing an act of restitution that the entire nation desperately needed. Her colleagues saw a different side. On a good day she was “enormously curious” and “amazingly accommodating”, according to a former employee. But another consultant remembered her “princess-like temper. She would shout and vent”. (He resigned after eight months.) “She’s a control freak, a scary person,” said the consultant. A visit to the grand Ceausescu Palace in Bucharest conjured ghosts of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu and what was known as a “conjugal dictatorship” before their unceremoniously swift trial and execution.