When strongmen fall

In a park in the middle of Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, sits Hosni Mubarak. The bronze statue, erected in 2007, stands against a hokey-looking backdrop of diminutive pyramids, but the subject’s face still bears “the wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” that Shelley once ascribed to another fallen pharaoh. “Look on my works, ye mighty,” Mubarak could be saying, “and despair!”