“The text sparkles with shrewdly plausible inferences mortared into a compelling narrative . . . [Short] is excellent at coining pithy summations of political motives that ring humanly true.
The man who changed the course of modern FranceIn 1981, Francois Mitterrand became France’s first popularly elected socialist president. By the time he completed his mandate, he had led the country fo
The first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last sixty years Vladimir Putin is the world's most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story. Unflinching, hard-hitting, and objective, Philip Short's biography gives us the whole tale, up to the present day. To the fullest extent anyone has yet been able, Short cracks open the strongman's thick carapace to reveal the man underneath those bare-chested horseback rides. In this deeply researched account, readers meet the Putin who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right
Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning: François Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as President, strove to dra
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 milli
