From the Economist obituary of General Vo Nguyen Giap, who drove well-funded foreign powers from Vietnam and lived to 102:

“Not that he was a populist, exactly. His father had been a lettré, a local scholar, as well as a farmer; he himself had a law degree. He was dapper, reviewing his troops in a white suit, trilby and club tie; even in a mountain cave, diminutive and smiling, he looked fresh as a flower. He wrote poetry, and his French was impeccable. The French, though, could see through that to the hatred that burned beneath, ever since the deaths of both his father and his first wife, after brutal torture, in French prisons. They called him ‘a volcano under snow.’

Nonetheless, he made an improbable soldier. He had no training, and would never have become a military commander, he said, if Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietminh forces and later of North Vietnam, had not decided it for him. He first met Ho (above, top right) in China, realised they had been to the same school, and idolised him, from his tufty beard to his white rubber sandals. He called him ‘Uncle’; Ho called him ‘beautiful as a girl.’ “