THESE ARE SOME of the books piled on a low table in the Parkview sitting room of Sir David Akers-Jones, former chief secretary and, for a period in 1987, acting governor of Hong Kong: Sir Percy Cradock's Know Your Enemy, A.J.P. Taylor's Europe: Grandeur and Decline, Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason and that punctuation guide by Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
A copy of Akers-Jones' autobiography, Feeling the Stones, released yesterday, is nearby. You could - depending on what you think of this former servant of the British crown for 30 years, who became a China adviser amid the hectic political jockeying of Hong Kong's final colonial years - just as easily ascribe those other titles about enemies, decline and the dream of reason to his life. Akers-Jones is the man who came to Hong Kong, in the summer of 1957, ate the lotus leaves of administrative power within the last outposts of empire, shot an unexpected bolt - and stayed.
Now, at 77, he has committed what the book's subtitle terms his reminiscences to paper. It's a curious read, not least because it's difficult to know at whom it's aimed. In his preface, Akers-Jones writes that he hopes it will be read by a wider audience than those who live or have lived in Hong Kong.
Yet there are so many gaps in the tale. Of the crucial period leading up to the Joint Declaration in 1984, he writes, 'Much has been written about the twists and turns of the negotiations themselves. There is not much more to be said.'
There is so little insight into individuals. Martin Lee Chu-ming, for instance, is mentioned just once in the index - exactly the same billing as Pierce Brosnan, who filmed a scene from Noble House in Akers-Jones' official residence.
Conversation is entirely absent (and there is negligible reported speech), and, overall, the sense of an emotional reining-in is so strong that one has to wonder what the impetus was to undertake such a project in the first place.