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.

Akers-Jones ponders this question for a long time, gazing out of the window at the magnificent clouds piled up over Tai Tam Country Park. This is a pattern that will emerge in 41/2 hours of conversation on Friday, June 4 - an inauspicious date, he agrees, but only because Friday is named after a goddess 'and so you can't rely on it'. All that afternoon, as the bright light outside blazes, dwindles, then diminishes into darkness, he stares out of the window, with occasional strolls around the room, and talks as if it's almost a relief to fill in the gaps of what was left out in print.

'We'd had various attempts at writing it, I must admit,' he says. The 'we' is not royal. It's a reference to Akers-Jones' wife of 51 years, Jane, who died in October 2002 and who was the woman he relied on his entire adult life. You'd never know that from the book, of course. Their meeting, courtship and marriage is conflated into a single sentence in the prologue.

'She was typing the book,' says Akers-Jones, in explanation of this omission. 'You get a bit of a hint of what she was like in it.' Not really. What was she like? 'First of all, she was very attractive. There were lots of eligible bachelors around,' he says. 'But she married me. I wasn't eligible, I had no money. Her mother and father wanted her to marry better than me.' He gives one of his characteristic compressed laughs - mouth tightly closed, eyes alight with humour. 'Her father had a knighthood and then I also got one . . . Jane and I almost wished they'd lived to see the day.'

The knighthood isn't mentioned in the book, nor does he use the official 'Sir' on its cover (although his full title is on his name card). 'I'm a modest sort of chap,' he says. He picks up Cradock's book, which has also omitted the word 'Sir' on its cover. 'I'm not sure people do put their titles on books really.' Does he ever see Cradock, former British ambassador to China and significant irritant to the administration of the last governor, Chris Patten? 'Not now,' he says. 'I don't go to England, and my daughter's in Australia with three grandchildren.'

This daughter, Bryony, who is adopted, isn't mentioned at all in the book. There's just a single reference to an un-named baby son. That was Simon, also adopted, who was killed at the age of 24 in a car accident on Castle Peak Road in March 1981. 'Too painful,' whispers Akers-Jones, looking out at the sky.

In the ensuing silence, he picks up the Truss book, flicks through it and says, brightly, of it: 'It's very sort of ... spiky, and provocative.' Was he tempted to be provocative in his book? 'No, I don't think so.' Another pause. 'I suppose I was very upset about being called a traitor.' His left hand, which is resting on the arm of the sofa, begins to rub back and forth with a papery sound of agitation. 'That was the press, you know. That was rather upsetting. Very upsetting. It's hidden away in the pages of the book.' He stops. ''Peking lapdog'. I'd 'jumped ship' - that was another expression. These bitter words.' He looks over, as if for reassurance, and pulls a face. 'Some of my colleagues circulated a letter that my pension should be removed. I don't write about it at length.'

On April 1, 1993, Akers-Jones travelled to Beijing to be formally appointed a Hong Kong Affairs Adviser in one of the sidehalls of the Great Hall of the People. Whether that was foolish, indecent or morally courageous, it will be the main thrust of any piece that will ever be written about him, including his obituary.

In his book, typically, the decision appears clear cut ('It was the most natural thing to lend a hand and join my friends as one of the advisers'), but there must have been hidden emotional eddies. The very title, Feeling the Stones, from a saying of Deng Xiaoping, reflects a careful, faintly hesitant progress across a river.

'I am careful,' Akers-Jones says now. 'I haven't the confidence of someone like Chris Patten ... Listening to people, I suppose, has been as important as talking - without interrupting or contradicting or getting into an argument.' Attempting to avoid argument, in fact, seems to have been why he chose the path of stones which led to Beijing. 'Not wishing to see Hong Kong in conflict with China,' he says of that journey. 'I like solving problems and finding solutions to what seem to be impossible situations - finding a way out. And Percy Cradock and I had found the way out.'

Then, Patten arrived, the stakes shifted, there was no through-train and Akers-Jones, opting to continue travelling north on a branch line, found himself the subject of hostile comment. If he wavered, you won't read of it in print. In the book, his attitude towards China is one of near-Panglossian optimism. 'China, with extraordinary magnanimity . . . remarkably and generously . . . going out of her way to demonstrate sincerity'. These are the phrases (on just one page, 154) he uses to describe the negotiations of 1984.

The account of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, five years later, is so veiled that if you didn't know better, you'd almost think it was a form of military slum clearance. There's no mention of deaths, injuries, nationwide detentions. (By contrast, Hong Kong governor Sir Edward Youde's peaceful demise in his sleep, also in Beijing, which he was visiting in 1986, is described as a 'tragic death'.) This isn't callousness. It seems to reflect a marked tendency in Akers-Jones to ignore what is too painful, not just in his private life, but in the public domain.

'Plenty of other people describe what happened,' he says of Tiananmen, on this afternoon, exactly 15 years later. 'We were saddened and disappointed. But Hong Kong recovered. There are people who want to remember, by the vigil and the marches.' Isn't remembering the dead a good thing? 'From the point of view of what Hong Kong is trying to do, and has got to do, it's probably better to remember in a different way.' He pauses. 'I haven't thought in what way.'

Yet he is, clearly, an emotional man. 'Yes,' he says. 'You're right. Yes. But you have to deal with your emotions. You learn how to cope. I learned how to cope, with the death of my mother when I was 14.' This event - a sub-clause on the first page of his book's prologue - was evidently so searing that when he refers to it twice, unprompted, during this interview, it's in a voice which is still, 63 years later, resonant with loss. He describes the wartime child he was, evacuated from Sussex to Nottingham, suddenly summoned home again to stand for a few moments by his mother's hospital bed. 'And then, you know . . . I was told that she died.'

He stops. Then he says, 'I suppose losing one's mother at that age - it's difficult to say what it does to you. It makes you independent, I suppose. There's no one quite like a mother to keep steering you along as you grow up. I'm a rather solitary figure now, really. I've tried to say this in the book.'

His grieving for his wife is palpable. ('If Jane were here now,' he remarks, at one point, 'she'd know the answer.') The couple had planned to retire to Queensland 'as we grew out of Hong Kong, really'. Now, after years of famously splendid homes, he is folded up, alone, into the Parkview flat. Does he feel confined? 'Yes,' he says, and looks onto the country park below. The spate of robberies has hemmed him in further. 'I'm fed up with not being able to go out, but I'm afraid to.'

Not that he lacks friends or committees or lunches to attend. He sighs. 'I'm 77, and I'm still being asked to find solutions to problems. I get rather tired.'

Painting soothes him, he says - and, perhaps, it unknots him psychologically in ways he hardly understands. Hanging on the wall, amid more predictable depictions of still lives, there's a curious picture he painted at the time of his wife's death, of a glade, half in sunshine, half in shadow, containing an empty table, and two sinister Victorian men who could be duellists or undertakers.

'I don't know why I painted that,' he says. He fetches another work: two paths, separated by a massively tangled tree, a Victorian man striding along each lonely route. It's set in Lugard Road, on the Peak, but an analyst might look at that dense thicket, that division of perspective, that glancing back to a lost era, those roads less travelled, and locate a different landscape entirely.