Dennis Sewell
The Politics of Piety
Living History
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
Headline 562pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Clinton Wars: An Insider's Account of the White House Years
By Sidney Blumenthal
Viking 822pp £25 order from our bookshop
‘President Mugabe said little during my courtesy visit with him in the presidential residence,’ reports the former First Lady of the United States, ‘…and he periodically broke into giggles for no apparent reason. I left believing he was dangerously unstable and hoping he would relinquish power.’ And before the manic cackling started? Had she arrived believing” that the crazed dictator’s record of genocide made him merely a kind of Mandela with attitude? Hillary doesn’t say; she just leaves the reader wondering what it was that Mugabe found so rib-ticklingly funny.
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