https://www.scmp.com/rss/1257/feed en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com President Xi Jinping's "four-point plan" presented to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is not original in content, but China's offer to enter the quagmire of Middle East politics is several steps removed from Deng Xiaoping's advice to keep a low profile. Some might argue that this is evidence that China seeks a political and diplomatic role that is commensurate with its enormous size and importance to the global economy. That is one part of the reason for these latest moves. The... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1236921/behind-chinas-mideast-peace-gesture?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1236921/behind-chinas-mideast-peace-gesture?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000 In a speech at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington recently, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe informed the audience of officials, experts and journalists that Japan is "back" and will not stand down in its ongoing sovereignty dispute with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. With Chinese provocations on the rise, US President Barack Obama, Abe's host, appealed for calm and restraint on both sides. Japan is likely to accede - grudgingly - to America's request, as... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1166737/chinas-dream-rebirth?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1166737/chinas-dream-rebirth?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:00:00 +0000 Some four years before the outbreak of the first world war, British author and politician Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, a best-seller that argued that war was obsolete between closely integrated economies. At the time, many of Britain's elites who believed that war was bad for business welcomed Angell's thesis and chastised those warning that there could be darker days ahead. Excited by the potential opportunities provided by a rising China, this same sentiment is carried by many... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1148761/china-must-keep-brash-pla-check-or-risk-war?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1148761/china-must-keep-brash-pla-check-or-risk-war?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000 The European Financial Stability Facility fund, targeted to top Euro1 trillion (HK$10.6 trillion), is the euro zone's last chance for survival. Hopes that China would ride in as Europe's white knight during the G20 meeting in Cannes last week did not come to fruition. As a cartoon in the People's Daily - showing an overweight European attempting to steal the dinner of a skinny Chinese man - suggests, there is little public appetite in Beijing for bailing out governments and citizens living ... https://www.scmp.com/article/984586/saving-itself?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/984586/saving-itself?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000 In a recent article published by Xinhua, the Paris conference on Libya's future without Muammar Gaddafi was decried as a West-dominated meeting seeking to entrench American and European interests by maintaining a pre-eminent role for Nato. Although the ousting of the Gaddafi regime was initiated by Libyans rather than outside powers, the fact that the National Transitional Council promised 'a new, democratic and pluralistic' government for all Libyans would have created further angst... https://www.scmp.com/article/978806/sidelines?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/978806/sidelines?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 11 Sep 2011 16:00:00 +0000 The Plot Against Pepys by James Long and Ben Long Faber & Faber, HK$280 In 1679, Samuel Pepys was at the height of his powers. A celebrated intellectual and member of parliament, he had also until recently been one of the most senior civil servants in the Admiralty. He was admired by King Charles II and close to Charles' brother and successor to the throne, James, Duke of York. But on May 22 that year his world came crashing around him. He was forced to embark on a legal marathon that... https://www.scmp.com/article/606382/plot-against-pepys?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/606382/plot-against-pepys?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 01 Sep 2007 16:00:00 +0000 IN THE SCHEME OF the reforms of senior secondary and university education, faculties of education get a double whammy. Not only are they having to re-engineer themselves for longer degrees. They are also having to prepare teachers for the changes in schools. The twin challenge is what is preoccupying John Lee Chi-kin, the dean of education at Chinese University of Hong Kong. The advent of four-year degrees posed a particular challenge for faculties of education and the Hong Kong Institute of... https://www.scmp.com/article/571106/challenges-change-and-five-year-conundrum?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/571106/challenges-change-and-five-year-conundrum?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:00:00 +0000 Pleasing Myself by Frank Kermode Allen Lane $340 FRANK KERMODE IS one of Britain's most respected academics. Pleasing Myself contains essays he wrote for literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1990s. As each piece is self-contained, this is the sort of book that can be dipped into from time to time. There is an eclectic mix, not quite something for everyone, but when I struggled with an esoteric piece on obscure poets or modern art, I could find other material more to my... https://www.scmp.com/article/355898/substantial-titbits?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/355898/substantial-titbits?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 24 Aug 2001 16:00:00 +0000 IN THE LATE NINTH CENTURY, a monarch ruling over a relatively small domain made the sort of decision that turns a kingdom into an empire, and a minor royal house into a dynasty. Looking north from lowland Cambodia, he sent his army through the narrow passes of the Dongrek Mountains and descended to a sun-baked plain, rich with rivers and arable land. This was the Khorat Plateau, and the king was Indravarman I. He began an expansion that would eventually take the Khmer empire as far west as... https://www.scmp.com/article/353168/abode-gods?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/353168/abode-gods?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 23 Jul 2001 16:00:00 +0000 WITH A PROBLEM AS intractable as the Arab-Israeli conflict it is often difficult to believe there will ever be any light at the end of the tunnel. For those of us far removed from the present intifada, pictures of masked Palestinian youths throwing stones at soldiers seem a world away. By profiling individuals from both communities Anton La Guardia brings matters into sharper focus. The person who has just been shot, or who fired the shot, becomes somebody's husband, someone's son. Having been... https://www.scmp.com/article/352943/reporter-middle?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/352943/reporter-middle?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 20 Jul 2001 16:00:00 +0000 The Extinction Club by Robert Twigger Hamish Hamilton $220 ROBERT TWIGGER IS held in high regard by British critics, even though this is only his third book. The previous two have won literary awards. I haven't read them, but assume they are written in the same quirky style of the eccentric Englishman who would really rather be doing something other than the dirty business of earning a living. You get the impression that Twigger has only finished this book because his wife insists they need... https://www.scmp.com/article/350742/restless-style-hampers-progress?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/350742/restless-style-hampers-progress?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 22 Jun 2001 16:00:00 +0000 EVERY COUNTRY HAS its optimists and dreamers, but India produces them in spades. Thanks to visionary leaders like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India became democratic and not autocratic. However, according to entrepreneur Gurcharan Das, when it came to economics, the Congress Party's wisdom deserted it. It wasn't until 1991 before a government came along that got it right. In this authoritative book, Das, a former head of Procter & Gamble India, reflects on a working life... https://www.scmp.com/article/349409/elephant-economy-plods?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/349409/elephant-economy-plods?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 08 Jun 2001 16:00:00 +0000 The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman Free Press $200 FOR CENTURIES, the Bible was regarded as a sacred text that could not be questioned. With the Enlightenment, the inexorable march of scientific discovery and the Industrial Revolution, sceptics began to speak up. Few of them within the Christian or Jewish faiths doubted the existence of God, just the blind obedience of fundamentalists to the biblical text. So much of what was described flew in the face of... https://www.scmp.com/article/342298/when-word-god-not-enough?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/342298/when-word-god-not-enough?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 23 Mar 2001 16:00:00 +0000 NEXT MONTH WILL see the annual jamboree when this year's Nobel laureates get their medals and fat cheques. In all the pomp and publicity, questions about the validity of such awards will be forgotten and few who watch the ceremony on television will remember much about the man who started it all, except that he invented dynamite. If Alfred Nobel felt guilty about being an armaments manufacturer, he never showed it. He saw it as strictly business. But he was not your typical arms dealer. A... https://www.scmp.com/article/332266/wreathed-controversy?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/332266/wreathed-controversy?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 24 Nov 2000 16:00:00 +0000 PICTURE YOUR typical private detective - lantern jaw, cigarette dangling from bruised lips, hat pulled over one eye, and a stubby Baretta pistol in the pocket of his faded trenchcoat. Then replace it with a toga, sandals and sword and you have Marcus Didius Falco, gumshoe and sometime government informer of ancient Rome. The year is 74AD and while the Roman Empire flourishes, Falco's fortunes are not as bright. Having just spent a few hellish months in dusty Tripolitania helping out the emperor... https://www.scmp.com/article/331654/have-toga-will-travel?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/331654/have-toga-will-travel?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 17 Nov 2000 16:00:00 +0000 IN 1812 in the southern English coastal town of Lyme Regis, Mary Anning, the impoverished daughter of a carpenter, risked the caprices of an unpredictable tide, to reach a cliff face, chip away at unyielding rock and change the world forever. She found the entire skeleton of an unknown monster that baffled scientists but would eventually lead to an understanding of a lost prehistoric age. Deborah Cadbury could have called her book Dinosaur Wars, for her riveting account of the founding fathers... https://www.scmp.com/article/327625/bones-contention?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/327625/bones-contention?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 29 Sep 2000 16:00:00 +0000 EMPIRES HAVE APPEARED in many and varied forms over the centuries. Celebrations of a country's imperial heyday are nowadays considered inappropriate, but Dominic Lieven rightly feels that a historical overview of Europe's empires is necessary. In particular he is concerned with comparing the Russian (and later Soviet) empire and its competition - the empires of Britain, Austria Habsburg and the Ottomans. He has tried to determine where there was common ground and where they differed. The... https://www.scmp.com/article/326997/fall-imperial-powers?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/326997/fall-imperial-powers?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:00:00 +0000 IN 1698 A SMALL fleet set sail from the Firth of Forth bound for a new life in Panama. The ships were heading for the Isthmus of Darien and this was Scotland's only attempt at colonialism. It ended in tragedy, another of the Scots' heroic failures. Douglas Galbraith tells the disastrous story through the journals of the expedition's superintendent of cargoes, Roderick Mackenzie. It begins three years earlier, as Roderick comes to the teeming streets of Edinburgh where he hopes he will make his... https://www.scmp.com/article/322488/paradise-purgatory?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/322488/paradise-purgatory?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 28 Jul 2000 16:00:00 +0000 IT MAY BE DIFFICULT for many readers of this novel to appreciate that the world Mimi Chan describes did not end that long ago - a world of slavery, rampant adultery, opium smoking and bound feet. She tells the story of a wealthy Chinese businessman born in 1885, his nine wives including eight concubines, and their complicated and often tragic lives, first in Guangzhou and then in a mansion on the Peak. Chan is amply qualified to write such a novel, as her father-in-law had nine wives, although... https://www.scmp.com/article/318140/studious-account-innocence-lost?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/318140/studious-account-innocence-lost?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 02 Jun 2000 16:00:00 +0000 GEORGE SAUNDERS IS weird and then some. The America in his short stories is light years away from the picture postcard vision of sun-drenched cornfields swaying in the wind. In the short story that gives the book its title, Pastoralia is the sort of theme park that would give Disney executives a heart attack. Visitors see people as they lived in past epochs, such as the couple who play Neanderthal cave dwellers, daubing prehistoric paintings on walls, making unintelligible grunting noises and... https://www.scmp.com/article/317062/cruelty-laced-compassion?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/317062/cruelty-laced-compassion?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 19 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 In Colm Toibin's novel, three generations of a dysfunctional family are reluctantly brought together, to face the death of their youngest member. Declan is in the final painful stages of Aids. Only now, as he nears the end, does he have the courage to tell his older sister and mother. They gather, with two of his closest friends, in the grandmother's house on the edge of a crumbling cliff in southern Ireland. Unwelcome truths, buried for years, are brought into the open, as Declan's sister... https://www.scmp.com/article/297484/style-belies-flimsy-content?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/297484/style-belies-flimsy-content?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 22 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 Thailand has a rich and varied history. Never colonised by any of the European powers, it developed its own unique identity. Its golden age, culturally, was known as the Sukhothai period, after the city of that name. When it fell into decline in the middle of the 14th century a new city emerged. Ayutthaya was to become so powerful that it would unite all the Tai people (as the Thais were then known) in one kingdom, Siam. At the height of its power in the 17th century, the population of... https://www.scmp.com/article/294392/remnants-golden-age?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/294392/remnants-golden-age?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 21 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 Born into squalor, Henry Smart has all the cards stacked against him. With a mother ruined by poverty and childbirth, and a one-legged father who deserts the family soon after his son is born, Henry is forced to fend for himself. From an early age, he finds himself scouring the fetid alleys of Dublin's slums, stealing food wherever he can find it, for himself and his consumptive little brother. Racked by hunger and riddled with lice, Henry grows up with the cunning of a street fighter, a... https://www.scmp.com/article/292696/journey-through-troubles?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/292696/journey-through-troubles?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 03 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 When the first slaves from West Africa were taken to Portugal, in August 1444, it marked a new phase in a trade as old as recorded history. The entrepreneur responsible, the King of Portugal's brother, Henry the Navigator, could not have foreseen that he was opening a new chapter of the trade that would span more than four centuries, change Africa forever and cause misery to millions of innocent people. Hugh Thomas is one of Britain's most celebrated historians. His Spanish Civil War is the... https://www.scmp.com/article/289503/slave-trade-disgrace-regardless-era?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/289503/slave-trade-disgrace-regardless-era?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 30 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000 Russia's artistic past is inseparable from the suffering of its people, whether it reflects their deep religious beliefs and a hope of a better life after this one, or whether it looks at the lowest depths to which humankind can stoop. The paintings, poems, plays and novels of this vast land provide an insight into a painful past, where suffering held sway over pleasure for most of the population. Bruce Lincoln - distinguished research professor of Russian history at Northern Illinois... https://www.scmp.com/article/261498/roots-nations-past?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/261498/roots-nations-past?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 06 Nov 1998 16:00:00 +0000 Readers' hackles may be raised on seeing the cover of this book bearing the words: 'The astonishing story of the survival of the Tsarevich. Written by his son.' Mine were. This reviewer never doubted that in July 1918, the Romanov dynasty of Russia came to an abrupt and bloody end when the Tsar, Tsarina and their children were executed by a firing squad, in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. Now, here was a former college principal from Northern Ireland, claiming that Nicholas II's only son, the... https://www.scmp.com/article/261500/conspiracy-or-crackpot?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/261500/conspiracy-or-crackpot?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 06 Nov 1998 16:00:00 +0000 In a heart-warming salute to the resilience of the human spirit, Hong Kong's adopted writer Martin Booth tells the story of British citizen Alexander Bayliss, sent to a Russian gulag in the early 1950s after being accused of spying. After 26 years of hard labour in the prison mine, he was freed and ever since has chosen to live in the tiny village of Myshkino, with the daughter and the son-in-law of a fellow inmate who died when a coal-face collapsed. Now, on his 80th birthday, Bayliss is... https://www.scmp.com/article/259892/surviving-gulag?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/259892/surviving-gulag?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 23 Oct 1998 16:00:00 +0000 As Russia's democracy teeters, it is tempting for the beleaguered Russian people to look for saviours. Alexander Lebed would like to be such a saviour. However, as this biography shows, he is an unpredictable, complex, paradoxical man. At one moment he is railing against corruption and Kremlin demagogues: the next, he sounds like a demagogue himself. It is difficult to tell if this is just part of his Russian character or an indication of his political inexperience. Harold Elletson knows all... https://www.scmp.com/article/254130/fiery-general-naive-politician?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/254130/fiery-general-naive-politician?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 04 Sep 1998 16:00:00 +0000 One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, John Murray, $425 On October 22, 1962, the world stood on the brink of Armageddon. President John F Kennedy, who only days earlier had discovered the presence of nuclear missiles on Cuba, issued an ultimatum to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. If Khrushchev did not accede to the ultimatum, nuclear war was an almost foregone conclusion. Many books have been written about those days,... https://www.scmp.com/article/240047/unique-insight-other-side-crisis?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/240047/unique-insight-other-side-crisis?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 08 May 1998 16:00:00 +0000 JOHANNES BRAHMS by Jan Swafford, Knopf, $350 Throughout his adult life, Johannes Brahms was regarded by some music critics as a poor person's Beethoven. One wag even dubbed his First Symphony 'The Tenth' (Beethoven had written nine symphonies). A few years after his death in 1897, Brahms, along with many other 19th-century composers, was temporarily consigned to the dustbin of musical history. The modernists with their atonal compositions were in the driving seat. Jan Swafford's... https://www.scmp.com/article/233355/misunderstood-genius-pre-empted-modernists?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/233355/misunderstood-genius-pre-empted-modernists?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 14 Mar 1998 16:00:00 +0000 She ruled the largest empire in the world and reigned for longer than any English monarch before or - so far - since. Yet today, people best remember the century named after her, rather than the real person behind the dour facade of Queen Victoria. The common assumption is that she was a mere figurehead who viewed her vast domain from a regal distance, while politicians like Disraeli, Gladstone and Palmerston carved up the world fighting over their share of the colonial cake with other... https://www.scmp.com/article/219442/queen-who-saved-throne?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/219442/queen-who-saved-throne?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 15 Nov 1997 16:00:00 +0000 ALBERT, UNCROWNED KING by Stanley Weintraub, John Murray, $425 Prince Albert is probably remembered for two things by most people - that he was the husband of Queen Victoria, and buildings named after him. His greatest claim to fame for those not familiar with his life is that he died relatively young, plunging his widow into a period of mourning which lasted 40 years. Stanley Weintraub restores Albert to his place in history. What emerges is a portrait of a sensitive and highly intelligent... https://www.scmp.com/article/212160/place-sun-victorias-beloved-albert?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/212160/place-sun-victorias-beloved-albert?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 20 Sep 1997 16:00:00 +0000 In January 1988, the poet Vitaly Shentalinsky wrote an open letter to the newspaper of the Writers' Union, Moscow branch, asking for the opening of crucial files locked in the vaults of Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB. Throughout the 1930s, some of the Soviet Union's brightest and best novelists, philosophers and poets had disappeared into the torture chambers of Lubyanka and from there to the execution yard or the dreaded concentration camps of Kolyma in Siberia. Their works were... https://www.scmp.com/article/212055/kgb-files-yield-literary-gems?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/212055/kgb-files-yield-literary-gems?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 19 Sep 1997 16:00:00 +0000 If there is one theme that runs through this excellent book of short stories by William Trevor, it is the enduring power of love. The most admirable characters in these vignettes are those couples who have stayed together until old age, through all the vicissitudes of life. Ironically, in the story which Trevor uses as the title of the book, After Rain, Harriet is a woman still in her youth, who despite a succession of affairs, has failed to find a lasting relationship. If Trevor was not... https://www.scmp.com/article/205287/poignant-tales-power-love?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/205287/poignant-tales-power-love?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 25 Jul 1997 16:00:00 +0000 CHARITY Len Deighton HarperCollins $195 This is the final part of the third Bernard Samson trilogy and the last of the 10 novels dealing with Samson and his friends and enemies in a Berlin where the wall has not yet come down. It begins in the early days of 1988. Samson, the tough British Secret Intelligence Service agent, is still trying to repair his marriage to Fiona, following her dramatic escape from East Germany where she was working undercover. He also wants to get to the bottom of... https://www.scmp.com/article/183813/len-deighton-stays-behind-wall?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/183813/len-deighton-stays-behind-wall?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 01 Feb 1997 16:00:00 +0000 LEWIS CARROLL: A Biography Michael Bakewell Heinemann $340 A passing remark by a little girl on a summer afternoon in 1862 presaged the greatest event in the history of children's literature. 'Oh Mr Dodgson, I wish you would write down Alice's adventures for me?' We should be grateful that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson listened to the nine-year-old Alice Liddell's plea, and, as Lewis Carroll, wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which as all Trivial Pursuit fans must surely know, has been... https://www.scmp.com/article/182017/through-novel-looking-glass?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/182017/through-novel-looking-glass?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 18 Jan 1997 16:00:00 +0000 Of all the countries and cultures encountered by the West over the past few hundred years, Japan has remained the most persistently bewildering. Using a plethora of sources, from 16th-century Jesuits to contemporary novels, newspaper articles and films, Ian Littlewood seeks to show that the West's view of Japan and its prejudices have not changed much over the years. In a book that from start to finish is a diatribe, Littlewood takes one idea, Western intolerance, and hammers it home any... https://www.scmp.com/article/180238/zen-and-art-cliche?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/180238/zen-and-art-cliche?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 03 Jan 1997 16:00:00 +0000 Iain Banks is one of the few living novelists whose works I look forward to reading. He is fresh, original and talented. At his best, he writes fiction that will survive him, but perhaps even the finest craftsmen should be allowed the occasional lapse. Writing under his science fiction persona Iain M Banks, he has created a patchy book which gets lost in the black hole of the universe born from his imagination. There are long, entertaining passages of scintillating prose and dialogue... https://www.scmp.com/article/176739/banks-lost-space?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/176739/banks-lost-space?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 04 Oct 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Jeff Torrington first came to prominence when, at the age of 57, he won the 1992 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his debut novel, Swing Hammer Swing!. The Devil's Carousel is cast in the same mould, a black comedy which sends the reader on a roller-coaster of the absurd, full of wisecracks, wordplay and puns. However this time he takes more time to get into gear and the first few chapters seem more like a series of vignettes, strung together by a common thread - the Centaur Car... https://www.scmp.com/article/173065/going-round-black-humoured-circles?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/173065/going-round-black-humoured-circles?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 06 Sep 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Behind the idyllic facade of rural communities lies a Pandora's box of lust and adultery. At least that seems to be Isla Dewar's theory for when Jessie Tate comes to live in the tiny Scottish seaside village of Mareth, instead of finding peace, she finds herself in the 'noisiest, rudest place in the world'. Dewar's first novel has the quirky humour of a Bill Forsyth film, odd characters out of sync with the modern world, offering homely wisdom and an idiosyncratic, bawdy way of expressing... https://www.scmp.com/article/171546/country-road-recovery?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/171546/country-road-recovery?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 23 Aug 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Long after Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud have died, arguments still rage between their followers about who was right and who was wrong. Some have moved on and updated and adapted the beliefs of these two intellectual giants but the fact that their views remain the subject of heated debate shows the importance of the two men's respective roles. Frank McLynn has bravely attempted to unravel the complex ideas of Jung, the great Swiss psychologist; a difficult task given that he was an... https://www.scmp.com/article/170756/jungs-journey-self-discovery?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/170756/jungs-journey-self-discovery?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 16 Aug 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Do not take John Lee Yiu-shing's latest work too seriously. Though billed as a theatre show about post-1997 uncertainties, the dancer and musician says it has more to do with wordplay than conveying meaningful political messages. Strategic Paranoia, a multi-media performance to be staged at the Hong Kong Arts Centre tomorrow night, is about Hong Kong politics - and poking fun at it. 'Everything in life, including politics, is a game,' Lee, 31, says. 'Life is one big game.' In a way, so is his... https://www.scmp.com/article/169102/reflections-growing-paranoia?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/169102/reflections-growing-paranoia?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 01 Aug 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Time travel in fiction is a dangerous business. On each page, the author risks stepping into a minefield of anachronisms. In all historical novels finding the right balance between facts to ensure authenticity and the flow of the narrative can be difficult. Mukul Kesavan makes a faltering start. He seems determined to convince readers that he knows his subject and that he is sure-footed in the India of 1942. Gradually, however, he finds his voice. What emerges is a compelling piece of... https://www.scmp.com/article/168434/trapped-past?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/168434/trapped-past?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 26 Jul 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Trotsky by Dmitri Volkogonov, HarperCollins $425 In 1978, Dmitri Volkogonov, a major-general from the propaganda section of the Red Army, felt it was time to reassess the role of Josef Stalin in Russia's turbulent modern history. With the advent of glasnost in the mid-1980s, he was permitted unprecedented access to military, Communist Party and KGB files and despite opposition from party hard-liners, he extended his studies to Lenin and Trotsky. This is the last of the three biographies to be... https://www.scmp.com/article/161964/trotskys-brave-red-world?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/161964/trotskys-brave-red-world?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 31 May 1996 16:00:00 +0000 To those familiar with British politics, Michael Foot is best remembered as the former leader of the Labour Party, an MP who edited the radical Tribune newspaper and was in the 1960s and early 1970s, a thorn in the flesh of the right-wing leadership of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. But aside from being a politician, Foot is also a consummate intellectual and journalist. His biography of another left-wing MP, the legendary Aneurin Bevin, has been rightly hailed as one of the great biographies... https://www.scmp.com/article/158659/alls-not-well-foots-eulogy?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/158659/alls-not-well-foots-eulogy?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 03 May 1996 16:00:00 +0000 War and man's inhumanity to man has always led to the suffering of innocents and, so often during a conflict, the trauma that afflicts children is forgotten. Children suffer far more from the small, savage civil wars that ravage Eastern Europe and Africa, than they did from World War I, for example, where the killing took place on battlefields. Nicholas Mosley reworks the age-old hope that the next generation will learn from this one's mistakes and gives it a new twist. He does so with... https://www.scmp.com/article/152987/young-people-power?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/152987/young-people-power?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 15 Mar 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Still by Adam Thorpe, Secker & Warburg, $272 NOVELISTS writing in a stream-of-consciousness style have to be very good or their prose simply becomes incomprehensible to the average reader. James Joyce carried it off in Ulysses, as did William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. But few writers since then have matched their genius. After finishing Adam Thorpe's 580-page tome, I had to admit that his idiosyncratic style got in the way of whatever plot existed. That is, if indeed one ever did... https://www.scmp.com/article/151260/character-search-story?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/151260/character-search-story?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 01 Mar 1996 16:00:00 +0000 THIS novella was written over 50 years ago by the father of the celebrated novelist V S Naipul. It is the latter who has arranged this new, amended edition of a work first published commercially in 1976. A privately-published edition came out in 1943. The story tells of a village of Indian immigrants in Trinidad and is a microcosm of the experience of the Indian community in this West Indian island during the first half of the 20th century. Gurudeva is the son of a sugar-cane farmer who, by... https://www.scmp.com/article/149215/sugar-beat?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/149215/sugar-beat?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 09 Feb 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Last Orders by Graham Swift, Picador, $272. FOUR friends make a journey from Bermondsey, London, to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds over the sea. As they travel slowly towards the coast, they each look back over their lives and the chances they have squandered. Vic is the undertaker whose funeral parlour was across the road from Jack's butcher's shop. Ray first met Jack during the North African campaign in World War II. Vince was orphaned by one of Hitler's V2 bombs and adopted by... https://www.scmp.com/article/148330/long-goodbye?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/148330/long-goodbye?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 02 Feb 1996 16:00:00 +0000 Lewis Carroll: A Biography by Morton Cohen, Macmillan $425. CHARLES Lutwidge Dodgson is a name that will be familiar to few readers. Like so many writers before and after him, it is by a pseudonym that he is best remembered. As Lewis Carroll, the creator of possibly the greatest work in children's fiction, Alice in Wonderland, his permanent place in literary history is assured. Morton Cohen, who has been studying this author for three decades, tries to show us the real man behind this... https://www.scmp.com/article/145851/wonderland-years?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/145851/wonderland-years?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 12 Jan 1996 16:00:00 +0000