In winter in Hunan, the wind howls bone-cold across bare fields of dry yellow earth, kicking up the dust so that it stings the eyes of the horses and makes men squint as they lean into the frozen air.

So begins Philip Short's monumental new biography of Mao Zedong - master politician, strategist and architect of modern China.

Mao has had a bad press in the West: branded a revolutionary despot whose determination to plant Communism in the soil of China cost more lives than either Hitler or Stalin.

But who was the real Mao? Short, for 30 years a BBC foreign correspondent who lived and worked in China in the 1970s and 1980s, has drawn on extensive interviews and a wealth of secret documentary material that has become available since Mao's death to try to answer that question.

He traces Mao's development from his childhood as son of a minor landlord in a remote village in impoverished Hunan province, to idealistic student and ultimately Great Dictator.

Throughout, his personal knowledge of China illuminates the text, bringing the great nation of 1.4 billion people and the man who did more than anyone else to drag it into the 20th century vividly alive.

Authoritative, balanced and beautifully written: this could well be the definitive biography.