Prize winning author, Christopher Hope, was six years old when he met his first dictator. It was Dr Henrik Verwoed, friendly neighbour and architect of the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa. Since then he has observed the cruelties and absurdities of tyranny in many places and amongst many peoples, most recently in the repeating patterns of repression instigated by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN is an impassioned reflection on the all too familiar traits of tyranny: its wild paranoia, its murderous conviction of righteousness, its narrow depleted vocabulary and its inability to concede power, however small. From Milsovik's Serbia, to the killing fields of Matabeleland, Christopher Hope reveals the vainglorious essence of tyranny as being the same, regardless of the race, nation or ideology it claims to embody. Bringing his unique experience and dazzling prose style to bare on the subject, he has produced a disturbing, wise, yet amusing text that combines memoir, interview and reportage to reveal the tragic absurdity of one man's lust for power