Philip Short

Philip Short was born in Bristol in 1945 and was educated at Cambridge University.

He became a journalist and worked for the BBC for 25 years as a foreign correspondent, contemplating the lunacies of politics in many different cultures from Sihanouk to Brezhnev and Clinton to Deng Xiaoping.

In 1997 he finished his final stint as BBC Washington correspondent and spent a year teaching journalism at the University of Iowa. He lives in Provence with his wife and son.

Philip Short's first book, BANDA, about the eccentric Malawi dictator was published in 1974. THE DRAGON AND THE BEAR, a comparison between China after Mao and Russia after Stalin followed in 1982. MAO: A LIFE was published in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton.

He is currently working on a biography of POL POT which will be published in 2004.

In the three-and-a-half years of his rule in Cambodia, more than a million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were executed or died from hunger and disease. A supposedly gentle, carefree land of slumbering temples and smiling peasants became a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which absolute obedience was enforced on the 'killing fields'.

Philip Short has spent four years travelling the length and breadth of Cambodia, interviewing surviving leaders of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge movement and sifting through previously closed archives from China, Russia and Vietnam, as well as Cambodia itself. Here, the former Khmer Rouge Head of State, Pol's brother-in-law and scores of lesser figures speak for the first time at length about their beliefs and motives, as Philip Short traces Pol Pot's life from altruistic youth to become one of the twentieth century's most egregious political monsters.