Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi - Softcover

'A stunning biography. Indira Gandhi was voted Woman of the Millennium, and yet her story is of a woman pushed into the public eye by men, corrupted by power and assassinated by those she should have trusted best – her own bodyguards' Jenni Murray, Sunday Times

'Well-researched, convincing and impressively fair to its subject' Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph

'A fascinating account of how an unpromising, if privileged, girl came to lead the world's largest democracy. Anyone who wants to get to the heart of this extraordinary woman (and the extraordinary country which she mothered, cajoled and eventually came to embody), could not do better than this accomplished book' Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

'Moving and revealing' Victoria Schofield, Financial Times

'An important study... compelling and humanly sympathetic' Sunil Khilnani, Sunday Telegraph

'An excellent biography' Geoffrey Moorhouse, Guardian

'A fascinating, rigorous highly readable study' Caroline Macdonald, Scotsman

The definitive and first non-partisan biography of one of the most formidable political figures of the twentieth century (voted Woman of the Millennium in a BBC poll, 2000)

Indira Gandhi’s life, from her birth in 1917, through partition and up to her assassination in 1984, was dominated by the politics of her country. Always directly involved in India’s turbulent twentieth-century history, once she accepted the mantle of power, she became one of the world’s most powerful and significant women. This biography, the first to be written by an unpartisan, Western woman, will focus on Gandhi’s role as a female leader of men in one of the most chauvinistic, complex and politicised cultures in the world.

Comprehensive, yet also personal, Frank’s biography will deal with power and how this often isolated woman handled it, alongside her family and her emotional life. It will be the definitive book on one of this century’s most powerful and important women.