(hardback: dust jacket included)

The life of Nelson Mandela, from the personal and the global perspective, is one of the epic stories of the twentieth century. It is also one of the most inspiring. Twenty years ago, Mandela was an almost forgotten figure languishing in jail on Robben Island; today, as he leaves office as President of South Africa, he is one of the most widely admired leaders on earth.

By giving Anthony Sampson unprecedented access to 27 years’ worth of unpublished correspondence from prison, as well as to other unpublished writings including his original, suppressed, autobiography, Mandela has enabled the author to write the most comprehensive account of his life to date. Sampson, who has known Mandela from the early 1950s, has also conducted hundreds of interviews with colleagues, family and friends as well as prison warders and Afrikaner ex-cabinet ministers, and he is the first person to have exclaimed prison archives in South Africa and diplomatic papers in Great Britain, the United States and South Africa.