Red Széll

He is both a creation of Red China, but also its leader who has helped mold

the China that we have now, which is the sort of techno state, techno security state, where super rich mafia-style families vie for supremacy among scandal and, well, all sorts.

I mean, some of the sex scandals that Michael Sheridan writes about are just...

Eye-raising.

And then you think, well, funnily enough, the same kind of thing was going on in New York at the same kind of time with Stormy Daniels, allegedly.

So, yeah, no, I mean, it is a fascinating portrait of a great world leader that also throws other world leaders into perspective as well.

And maybe...

bears out the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I absolutely love the new kind of trend of narrative history and narrative biography where you're really looking almost at a character study of the subject

of the book.

And I've got an interview coming up on My Life in Books in March with a guy called J. Randy Tarabarelli, who is a really celebrated biographer and one of the most respected authorities on the Kennedy family.

And his latest book, JFK, Public Private Secret, gives a really fabulous three-dimensional portrait of John F. Kennedy.

And, you know, the public side, you know, his service as a senator and a president is

the private side as a son, a brother, and a husband, and then the secret side, which shows his personal flaws, the sex scandals, the terrible problems he had with illness through his life.

He had awful back problems.

He had a back operation that nearly killed him.

None of this came out in his lifetime whatsoever.

And Tarabarelli delves into Secret Service files, into open source history.

But he also has 35 years of interviewing people who knew JFK, who were intimate with him.

He has personal memoirs from...