A £1.5m grant has been awarded to discover how living under a dictatorship affected the every day lives of ordinary people.

Dr Kate Ferris from the University of St Andrews will be the first to explore how every day life under the 20th century dictatorships of Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and Metaxas compare.

The project is hoped to demonstrate the complex ways in which dictators' ideology and practices were enacted in the ordinary world.

The aim is to reveal the differences between how the dictator intended to impose his will, and the "actually-existing" dictatorship.

Dr Ferris said: "Although 'dictatorship' conventionally conjures an image of a charismatic, dogmatic (male) leader ruling from on high, through magnetism, propaganda and violence, it is crucial to remember that individual men, women and children experienced dictatorship subjectively.

"They encountered the dictatorial state not just in official policies and propaganda, but in everyday settings: the market; the factory; the bar; the street; the home."