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 propaganda - his family, his beliefs and his horrors. In doing so he shows us both the human being Mao was, and the monster he became.

Philip Short was for thirty years a foreign correspondent for the BBC, based in Washington, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo and Beijing. He lived and worked in China for two decades in the 1970s and 1980s, and has returned regularly to the country ever since. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of Mitterrand, A Study in Ambiguity (2013) and Pol Pot, Anatomy of a Nightmare (2006).