When we lionise a public figure, the truth about their persona is often blurred to fit the hyperbole. Perhaps the most famous recent example is former US president Barack Obama. His breathless, bobby-soxer type followers lost sight of the fact that he took the drone war in Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq to an entirely new level, where drones substituted for boots on the ground. The civilian casualty rate from drone strikes remains in doubt, from a couple of hundreds to the thousands, but Obama