These political biographies are intended to analyse in depth the real men lurking behind the personality cults of great contemporary statesmen. Their purpose is to explain how such political leaders of our times as Mao Tse-Tung and Macmillan, de Gaulle and Stalin, Fidel Castro and Verwoerd formed their political outlooks, to examine how they gained power and how they held and exercised it, and to suggest what each of them has come to epitomize in the eyes of his own nation and of the world at large.