PREFACE AND

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I have to start with a confession: I lost my heart to Brazil at the age of nearly twenty-five, in 1965, when I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to spend six months in Brazil, theoretically linked to the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro but in reality free to work as an independent journalist. The scholarship was awarded by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, the Itamaraty, and was handled on behalf of the Brazilian Embassy in London by the British Council. At the time, I was a staff reporter for The Guardian, which generously gave me a leave of absence.

      The period was exciting for a young journalist interested in politics. The military government that had overthrown President Goulart had not quite congealed into the brutal regime it became later, and there was still active civilian opposition and a relatively free press. Over the following decade I made further visits, collecting material for three books. Then, in the early 1980s, my own career took a different turn. I left journalism and immersed myself in the affairs of the Commonwealth of Nations, undertaking a series of different activities.

      It was only in 2005, when I was due to retire from the last of these, the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit at London University, that I was free to return to a Brazilian topic. The extraordinary and controversial life of Lula, the president of Brazil since the beginning of 2003, beckoned as a subject for a life-and-times biography.

      What follows, therefore, is an attempt to provide a readable account of the current Brazilian president, set against the recent history of his country. The questions asked here relate not only to the unprecedented arrival in the presidency of an industrial worker who grew up poor, with many disadvantages, but also to the democratization of Brazil after the military was forced out; a new kind of leftist party built on a renewed union movement; the difficulties of progressive politics in an era of globalization and the free movement of capital; corrupt aspects of the Brazilian political system; and the ambition of Lula and many others that