Philip Short (born 17 April 1945) is a British journalist and author. He was born in Bristol. He studied at Queens' College, Cambridge. After graduation, he spent from 1967 to 1973 as a freelance journalist, first in Malawi, then in Uganda. He then joined the BBC as a foreign correspondent. He worked there for 25 years. He is the author of several books, among them the biographies of Hastings Banda, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, François Mitterrand, and Vladimir Putin.He presented a TV documentary on Mao Zedong entitled Mao's Bloody Revolution Revealed on the UK terrestrial station Five in May 2007. Source: Wikipedia (en)