Lives of the Dictators.(Idi Amin)

Idi Amin likes the quiet life these days. Folks in the Saudi city of Jidda talk of a devout Muslim and dedicated family man. Often he's seen at the airport collecting parcels of his favorite foods, flown in from his native Uganda. Otherwise, the dictator in exile likes to fish, play the organ and exercise at a local gym. As he tells interviewer Riccardo Orizio: "I'm first and foremost a boxing champion, as you know." That isn't how he's remembered back home. His eight-year rule saw 300,000 people murdered. Some victims were reportedly fed to the crocodiles. Before his overthrow in 1979, Uganda's economy was in ruin, thanks in part to his expulsion of 80,000 Asians. So does he feel remorse? "Only nostalgia," he says.

No surprise there. Self-reproach, according to Orizio, is unknown among ex-tyrants. Over the past few years the Italian journalist has interviewed five of the world's best-known deposed despots, as well as the wives of two others. With plenty of blood on their hands, many are reviled figures. But what emerges from Orizio's book "Talk of the Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators" (200 pages. Secker & Warburg.) is their heroic capacity for self-delusion and self-absorption. Take "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the ousted ruler of Haiti, whose family and associates are thought to have pilfered more than 60 percent of the national income in the 1980s. "I am proud of what my father ['Papa Doc'] and I did for Haiti," says Duvalier. Indeed, he's still looking forward to a second chance. "I am the only one who can save the country," he insists.

Such megalomania might be comical if its consequences weren't so tragic. Isolated by power, Orizio's strangest characters lose any sense of the ridiculous. Amin styled himself "conqueror of the British Empire" and took to offering advice on diplomacy to other world leaders, from President Richard Nixon to Mao Zedong. In the 1970s, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the self-appointed emperor of the Central African Republic, was responsible for the killing and torture of scores of demonstrators. After his downfall, troops found an outsize freezer full of cadavers, many belonging to student leaders. Yet Bokassa believed that he was secretly named by the pope as "13th apostle of the Holy Mother Church."

Such pretensions prove hard to maintain out of office. Amin now lives modestly on a pension ...