Tito also illuminates the inner circle, especially Tito's Montenegrin adviser Milovan Djilas, eventually sacrificed in a deal with the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. But Neil Barnett never quite tells us how the young Josip Broz, who served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Serbian front in the first world war, grew into such an ardent pan-Yugoslavist. Hatred for his drill sergeant, a fellow Croat, may have been a factor. Perhaps a fuller answer will come from Ivo Banac, the US-based Croatian historian whose forthcoming Tito biography, Barnett says, "could well become the definitive work". Neil Barnett's Tito, though a slim 175 pages, is entertaining and timely. Apart from Montenegro's referendum, we are in the middle of Kosovo's final status negotiations. A decade on from the Bosnian war, Barnett provides a blunt reassessment of the limits of holding a state together by force of personality. Like the country he led, Tito had multiple identities: the communist who carved out a separate path from Stalin's Soviet Union; the Slovene-Croat who imposed "brotherhood and unity" ruthlessly; the dictator who kept most of his people happy with relative wealth, backed up by international loans.