Brothers Under The Skin: Travels in Tyranny

Christopher Hope

Aug 2012 · Pan Macmillan

About this ebook

A brilliant examination of Robert Mugabe dictatorship and the nature of modern tyranny, written by an award winning novelist and journalist.Christopher Hope met his first dictator when he was 6 years old. Dr Henrik Verwoerd was a neighbour of the Hope family and went on to become the architect of apartheid. He was the first, but not the last. In this remarkable book, Christopher Hope searches out the unmistakable 'perfume' that marks out a tyrant, a tyrant like Robert Mugabe. Hope though the days of Verwoerd were gone until Robert Mugabe began to mimic the old Doctor. Hope dissects the person and presumption of Mugabe, the mixture of terror and comedy that makes up his dictatorship. Furthermore Perfume of a Tyrant describes the nature of modern tyranny, its wild paranoia, its murderous conviction of righteousness, its narrow depleted vocabulary and its inability to concede power, however small. Even though modern tyranny is not exclusively Zimbabwean, African or European, in Robert Mugabe is its leading exponent

About the author

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1944, moving to London in 1975. He is the author of twelve novels including winner of the Whitbread Novel Award, Kruger’s Alp and the Booker shortlisted Serenity House. Hope's non-fiction includes a highly praised volume of autobiography, White Boy Running (1988), a travel book, Moscow! Moscow! (1990), which won a PEN Award and, as a journalist, seminal pieces on Dr Verwoerd, Emperor Bokassa and Milosevic.