Aged about 19, I spent part of one summer reading the Penguin translations of the novels and short stories of Ivan Turgenev. That sits a bit stark in the memory now, because despite the exquisite impression they made, with their delicate descriptions of gentle disappointment and bitter sweet love, I never went back and reread them
More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: 50 Things You Need to Know about British Elections, edited by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford (Biteback Publishing 2016) has about 50 short essays by those despised “experts” that Secretary of State Michael Gove berated in 2016 during his own 15 minute stint at being famous. The book is
The one thing I knew about the great Ming novel The Golden Lotus (Jinpingmei – 金瓶梅) by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng (Tuttle 2011) was that it is regarded as an infamously explicit text with passages so inflammatory that its earlier translators into English rendered the most lurid into Latin, as a form of delicate censorship. This
It is a sultry early autumn day in the central province of Hunan in China, half a century ago in 1967. In a small cluster of villages, remote from the main political centre in Beijing, life revolves around farming, tending animals, just making a basic living. But for a couple of weeks, from around the 20th
I started 2017 by ending a reading of John Minford's magnificent translation of the classical Chinese uber-text, The Book of Changes (I-Ching, or, in pinyin, Yijing): I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom (Viking 2014). This is an Amazon affiliate link for your convenience. We also encourage you
The music critic Norman Lebrecht’s title to his study, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World (Faber and Faber 2010) has the sort of in-your-face tone that characterises the rest of the book. He makes the sort of claims about Gustav Mahler that the literary critic Harold Bloom in his dotage made
Eliot Weinberger has produced essays and translations ranging across cultures and languages. In a hybrid age, he is truly representative of a hybrid intellectual posture and approach. This short series of essays written over the last two decades, The Ghosts of Birds (New Directions Press 2016) exemplifies this, with pieces which are in the form of
Since the first unification of China in 220 BCE under the Qin dynasty, the issue of how such a diverse, disparate entity – something more akin at times to an empire, or a continent, than a country – governs itself has been the source of perpetual fascination. This is an Amazon affiliate link for your
Diplomacy and international relations are clearly a complex area. This is logical enough. Relations between two single people are enough to have inspired a large swathe of diverse literature. Magnify that by hundreds of thousands into the millions and you get the picture. It’s complicated. This is an Amazon affiliate link for your convenience. We
Almost exactly two decades ago when I began my somewhat short-lived (eight years) stint as a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I had an encounter with my first boss – a much stressed out mandarin, who made the comment one day that he had “no idea what most people did during their working day”.
