James Kelman’s ‘Memoirs’ are a misnomer
James Kelman doubtless remains best known for his 1994 Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late and…
Poetic miniatures: A Lover’s Discourse, by Xiaolu Guo, reviewed
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Anglo-Chinese misunderstanding: an Oxford don visits 1960s Beijing
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…
Entente hostile: China, Japan and Korea
The mutual animosity of the Far East Asian nations can strike some as baffling, given their shared history and cultures,…
The Adulterants: a caustic take on London’s brutal property market
Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The…
The keys to Chinese
The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But…
