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, Random House, 2013) and Pol Pot (Anatomy of a Nightmare, Henry Holt, 2006).