A definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's most glamorous, complicated political figures.
Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning: FranCois Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as President, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse country into the modern world.
As a statesman and as a human being, he was the incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find so perennially frustrating. He embodied the ambiguities and the contradictions of a...

One of the great figures of the twentieth century, Chairman Mao looms irrepressibly over the economic rise of China. Mao Zedong was the leader of a revolution, a communist who lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, an aggressive and distrustful leader, and a man responsible for more civilian deaths than perhaps any other historical figure. Now, four decades after Mao's death, acclaimed biographer Philip Short presents a fully updated and revised edition of his ground-breaking and masterly biography. Vivid, uncompromising and unflinching, Short presents in one-volume the man behind the...