It would be hard to find someone in Hong Kong who hasn't heard of irrepressible journalist, author and South China Morning Post columnist Kevin Sinclair.
As a writer, Sinclair is both loved and loathed. His columns over the years have drifted between informative insights and thunderous rants. The views he espouses are sometimes staunchly conservative and at others astoundingly liberal.
The certainty with all of them is that he speaks his mind. Readers may not like what he has to say, but they love to read him anyway. No one is spared, from popular politicians to greedy New Territories landowners or ignorant pet owners - Sinclair never minces his words.
As a journalist, Sinclair has covered every aspect of Hong Kong's growth since he arrived in the late 1960s: its people, famous and obscure; its institutions, noble and corrupt; its politics, through the shudders of China's Cultural Revolution, the fear in years preceding the 1997 handover, and the slow climb towards democracy since.
And he has delved into its history. Former permanent secretary for home affairs Shelley Lee Lai-kuen, in the book's foreword, writes: 'Many people feel he knows more about our New Territories villages than some of the clansmen who live in them.'
As a person, this gregarious, larger than life character is hard not to like. Endeavouring to speak Cantonese in a colonialist era when it was unfashionable to do so, he won many friends far from the flotsam of transitory expatriate Hong Kong and became enmeshed in the heart of the community that expats seldom see.