There has been much Mandela musings over the years since he was released from Robben Island after 27 years of tough, mostly brutal, imprisonment in 1990; three years later he won the Nobel Peace Prize and a year later he became the first democratically elected President of South Africa. To all of us he the Man of the 20th Century.
His Autobiography Long Walk To Freedom sold millions when it was first published in 1994 and there have been a string of biographies with the best being Anthony Sampson's Mandela.
Born in July, 1918 Mandela is now frail and his public appearances are limited. He attended the opening and closing ceremonies of the Rugby World Cup in 1995 (wonderfully caught subsequently in John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy) and would have repeated that exercise in the recent Soccer World Cup but for the untimely death of his great, great grand daughter, Zenani Mandela aged 13 to which his new book Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself is dedicated.
The book shows the private man behind the public face - 70 hours of recordings with friends, cartoons, doodles, musings, letters, half completed manuscripts, writings and more.
I was lucky enough to meet Mandela twice: once at a private dinner in St John's Wood with Anthony Sampson and Donald Woods and once at a dinner at The Dorchester just after he'd been released. For some time I was a paid up member of the London branch of the ANC