Titans, before they bathetically lent their name to that luckless Atlantic liner, were an ancient race of Greek deities, spawned by the earth mother Gaia and eventually supplanted by those younger, more loftily detached mountain-dwellers, the Olympians. According to the myth, a Titan, Prometheus, created the human race, moulding our forebears out of mud and shielding them from the contempt of the Olympian tyrant Zeus. Simon Sebag Montefiore's Titans have no such benevolence. They are an undivine lot  a strutting parade of psychopathic dictators, warlords and malevolent dwarves, whose common motive is to frighten humanity into submission or, failing that, to torment and murder as many of their fellow men as possible. We were better off, it turns out, as subjects of the gods.

Montefiore's compilation of short biographical profiles, which thriftily recycles material from his earlier anthologies of Monsters and Heroes, finds room for a few gods and for one or two secular saints. Near the beginning, he pays tribute to the Buddha and to Jesus Christ and just before the end there are potted lives of Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi, the consciences of their respective nations. But the two final entries revert to the venal, lethal norm: the climax of this millennial survey, which starts with the self-immortalising slave-driver Rameses the Great, arrives with the foul lives and ignominious deaths of Escobar the Colombian drug trader and Osama bin Laden, a nihilist "whose only practical policy was terrorising innocent people and destroying tolerant democratic societies".

Stalin, the subject of Montefiore's superb two-volume biography, is the prototype for many of the maniacal autocrats whose rages and rampages are summarised here. Monsters outnumber heroes and Montefiore reserves his admiration for those who behave unheroically or ironically disparage their own mystique. He commends the piety of Cromwell as much as his military skill and is complimentary about the democratic manners of two American founding fathers  Washington, who set standards of "probity and honesty" in public life, and Jefferson, who welcomed guests to the White House in his slippers. Abraham Lincoln, Montefiore says, was "truly good as well as truly great". Churchill earns points for joking about his reputation: when his grandson asked if he was the greatest man in the world, the old bulldog barked: "Yes! Now bugger off!"

Women, less infatuated by the idea of greatness, make only intermittent appearances, apart from such dragon ladies as Elizabeth I, the ghastly Chinese dowager empress Cixi, and of course Margaret Thatcher, who transformed the handbag into a weapon of war. Montefiore remarks that Jane Austen was "famously private", which is surely an oxymoron. The Resistance fighter Odette Sansom behaved with fortitude when captured by the Nazis but lacked the showy bravado that we expect of a hero: the Germans nicknamed her the White Mouse.

As the centuries pass, the hangings, decapitations and disembowellings become numbingly repetitive. Montefiore seems almost to admire those ogres who invent new modes of excruciating the human body. Ivan the Terrible sews up a refractory archbishop inside the skin of a bear, then sets a pack of hounds loose on him; Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic ogre, ties his victims between the bent-back branches of trees, which when released tear them apart.

While deploring the sadism of these megalomaniacs, Montefiore takes an illicit pleasure in watching them disgrace themselves when their comeuppance arrives. Hauled off to execution, Stalin's police chief Yezhov suffers a panicked fit of hiccups, while his successor Beria, whose own downfall soon follows, has to have a towel stuffed in his mouth to stifle his gibbering before he is shot through the forehead; Gaddafi begs for mercy from the mob that lynches him. At least Elena Ceausescu, hustled to her death after an abbreviated trial on Christmas Day in 1989, maintains a facade of virulent contempt, while her more devoutly doctrinaire husband sings the Internationale, she curses the firing squad as "motherfuckers!"

More than an encyclopaedia of infamy, what Montefiore presents is a panorama of self-destruction and pointless vengeance. His is a dismayingly conservative view of history, in which the wheel of fortune remorselessly turns to confound crazy ambitions. Among his horde of brutish Titans are a smattering of scientists and artists, but their achievements hardly manage to maintain the pretence of civilisation. In any case, I don't trust Montefiore's appreciations of people whose lives are blamelessly and boringly spent at their desks: his pages on Mozart are tone deaf, and his literary judgment is dubious, since he considers A Tale of Two Cities to be Dickens's finest book and thinks that Churchill's "writing was as fine as his leadership". His claim that "every one of the eight million words" in Proust's sequence of novels "seems to have been precisely chosen" is an outrageous bluff.

What excites Montefiore is villainy. He describes the dynasty founded by the 10th-century harlot Marozia as a "papal pornocracy", and his own special delight is the pornography of power. Though he does this kind of thing with wicked verve, I fear he enjoys it all a little too much.

Titans, before they bathetically lent their name to that luckless Atlantic liner, were an ancient race of Greek deities, spawned by the earth mother Gaia and eventually supplanted by those younger, more loftily detached mountain-dwellers, the Olympians. According to the myth, a Titan, Prometheus, created the human race, moulding our forebears out of mud and shielding them from the contempt of the Olympian tyrant Zeus. Simon Sebag Montefiore's Titans have no such benevolence. They are an undivine lot  a strutting parade of psychopathic dictators, warlords and malevolent dwarves, whose common motive is to frighten humanity into submission or, failing that, to torment and murder as many of their fellow men as possible. We were better off, it turns out, as subjects of the gods.

Montefiore's compilation of short biographical profiles, which thriftily recycles material from his earlier anthologies of Monsters and Heroes, finds room for a few gods and for one or two secular saints. Near the beginning, he pays tribute to the Buddha and to Jesus Christ and just before the end there are potted lives of Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi, the consciences of their respective nations. But the two final entries revert to the venal, lethal norm: the climax of this millennial survey, which starts with the self-immortalising slave-driver Rameses the Great, arrives with the foul lives and ignominious deaths of Escobar the Colombian drug trader and Osama bin Laden, a nihilist "whose only practical policy was terrorising innocent people and destroying tolerant democratic societies".

Stalin, the subject of Montefiore's superb two-volume biography, is the prototype for many of the maniacal autocrats whose rages and rampages are summarised here. Monsters outnumber heroes and Montefiore reserves his admiration for those who behave unheroically or ironically disparage their own mystique. He commends the piety of Cromwell as much as his military skill and is complimentary about the democratic manners of two American founding fathers  Washington, who set standards of "probity and honesty" in public life, and Jefferson, who welcomed guests to the White House in his slippers. Abraham Lincoln, Montefiore says, was "truly good as well as truly great". Churchill earns points for joking about his reputation: when his grandson asked if he was the greatest man in the world, the old bulldog barked: "Yes! Now bugger off!"

Women, less infatuated by the idea of greatness, make only intermittent appearances, apart from such dragon ladies as Elizabeth I, the ghastly Chinese dowager empress Cixi, and of course Margaret Thatcher, who transformed the handbag into a weapon of war. Montefiore remarks that Jane Austen was "famously private", which is surely an oxymoron. The Resistance fighter Odette Sansom behaved with fortitude when captured by the Nazis but lacked the showy bravado that we expect of a hero: the Germans nicknamed her the White Mouse.

As the centuries pass, the hangings, decapitations and disembowellings become numbingly repetitive. Montefiore seems almost to admire those ogres who invent new modes of excruciating the human body. Ivan the Terrible sews up a refractory archbishop inside the skin of a bear, then sets a pack of hounds loose on him; Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic ogre, ties his victims between the bent-back branches of trees, which when released tear them apart.

While deploring the sadism of these megalomaniacs, Montefiore takes an illicit pleasure in watching them disgrace themselves when their comeuppance arrives. Hauled off to execution, Stalin's police chief Yezhov suffers a panicked fit of hiccups, while his successor Beria, whose own downfall soon follows, has to have a towel stuffed in his mouth to stifle his gibbering before he is shot through the forehead; Gaddafi begs for mercy from the mob that lynches him. At least Elena Ceausescu, hustled to her death after an abbreviated trial on Christmas Day in 1989, maintains a facade of virulent contempt, while her more devoutly doctrinaire husband sings the Internationale, she curses the firing squad as "motherfuckers!"

More than an encyclopaedia of infamy, what Montefiore presents is a panorama of self-destruction and pointless vengeance. His is a dismayingly conservative view of history, in which the wheel of fortune remorselessly turns to confound crazy ambitions. Among his horde of brutish Titans are a smattering of scientists and artists, but their achievements hardly manage to maintain the pretence of civilisation. In any case, I don't trust Montefiore's appreciations of people whose lives are blamelessly and boringly spent at their desks: his pages on Mozart are tone deaf, and his literary judgment is dubious, since he considers A Tale of Two Cities to be Dickens's finest book and thinks that Churchill's "writing was as fine as his leadership". His claim that "every one of the eight million words" in Proust's sequence of novels "seems to have been precisely chosen" is an outrageous bluff.

What excites Montefiore is villainy. He describes the dynasty founded by the 10th-century harlot Marozia as a "papal pornocracy", and his own special delight is the pornography of power. Though he does this kind of thing with wicked verve, I fear he enjoys it all a little too much.