"Roger Gough has written the most profound and revealing biography which has been devoted to any Communist leader in Cold War Europe. 'A Good Comrade?' is based on exhaustive research and reading. Some of the research is based on official Soviet or Hungarian files which were closed to historians until recently, but Gough has also patiently located and interviewed scores of Hungarian witnesses, and searched through the back archives of Hungarian newspapers and journals....On every page, new information is carefully sourced, much of it demolishing the walls of half-truth and folk-lore which accumulated around Janos Kadar in his lifetime. But the strength of Gough's book is its vivid prose. The author disentangles complex strands of Party intrigue, but at the same time pulls out high literary skill to describe the gruesome, sometimes surreal ironies and tragedies of Kadar's career."--Neal Ascherson, journalist and author of Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, The Struggle for Poland and Black Sea