The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi

With great timing, Popham has released the paperback edition of his very accessible biography, first published earlier this year, to coincide with Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit this week to Britain. Today she is one of the world’s most famous pro-democracy crusaders, an exemplar of moral courage in the defiance of tyranny. Popham, a journalist with the Independent newspaper, interviewed her when she was released from house arrest in 2002, and met her again in 2011. Now he is in demand as a commentator on her latest challenge — representing her people as an elected MP.

The book fills in the background of her strict Buddhist upbringing to explain her apparently mysterious transformation from “a north Oxford housewife” to courageous world leader in 1988, when she left Oxford to return to Burma to nurse her sick mother. Her father, Aung San, had freed Burma from British colonial rule after the Second World War, but she was sent to St Hugh’s College to absorb western philosophy.

Popham’s account of the “Oxford years” is fascinating. He doesn’t think much of comments made by Suu’s tutor, Mary Warnock, about her Buddhism. But he also quotes some delightful descriptions by a fellow student, Ann Pasternak Slater, of how this graceful, shy girl learnt to ride a bicycle and punt, like a true Oxford student.