Jonathan Spence - historian, intellectual and eminent China scholar - is not one for a snappy answer. He's not slow to reply; just very thorough. Unhurriedly he paints a picture, sketching in plenty of detail and planting his response somewhere in the middle.
Ask him when he first became interested in China and he won't give you a hard and fast answer. He'll talk about his childhood, about his first conscious memory, and then go on to ponder whether we can even be certain that a memory is genuine. He'll want you to understand the context behind what he's saying - and it will always be interesting. Perhaps that's what sets him apart from other historians - this knack of spinning his web and drawing you in.
In town to deliver University of Hong Kong's inaugural Second Century Lecture and address an event at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, in May, he looked every bit the distinguished professor. At 76 he has a full white beard and a head of hair to match. Despite having lived in the United States for almost 50 years, he hasn't lost his British accent or dry humour. It's easy to see how he must have charmed the Americans when he arrived at Yale University in 1959. They quickly took to him and he was a firm fixture on campus until he retired, in 2008.
Born into a lettered family and boarding school-educated from the age of seven, his was a privileged and peaceful childhood despite the war years. His father had attended Oxford and Heidelberg universities and spoke fluent German, his mother was a passionate student of French literature and the interests of his three siblings covered the classics and French, German and Italian translation.
There was very little in the first 20 years of his life to hint at the abiding interest that would drive his career. But Spence is a man keenly aware of the complexities of the human condition, and has done some serious navel gazing, wondering where his great passion for China came from; when it began. And he thinks he can trace it to a trip to the cinema with his father in the early 1940s, when he was five or six years old.
He remembers it clearly: it's the second world war, a rare visit to the movies to see an early Disney film, Dumbo or Snow White, and there is a short news reel before the film starts.