In Italy this summer I will have with me a bagful of homework for my new novel on mediaeval Spain, including such exotica as the Penguin The Poem of the Cid, books on alchemy and astrology, Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, other collections of Arab and Hebrew poetry, and the newly published God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215 by David Devering Lewis - but there will still be a little space at the bottom of the bag for more self indulgent reading. I have purchased Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944-45 by James Holland (the fighting that took place near where I live still haunts people’s memories so it will be good to know the historical background); The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer about the mad Russian, Ungern Von Sternberg, and his mayhem in Mongolia in the 1920s; The Roads to Modernity by Gertrude Himmelfarb about the 18th Century Enlightenment; Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut (his posthumous essays); and, to keep my toe in China, Return to Dragon Mountain by Jonathan Spence, the memoirs of a Ming Dynasty scholar who sees his world destroyed when China is conquered by the Manchus.
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CHINA
Political and Economic
China Shakes The World by James Kynge.
Winner in 2007 of the prestigious Best Business Book of the Year Award. A must for anybody who wants to understand China as it is today, and its far reaching and expanding influence into every part of our lives. Beautifully written, it is as important and revelatory for the 2000s as Simon Leys’ Chinese Shadows which lifted the lid in the 1970s on what really happened during the Cultural Revolution , and in so doing changed our perceptions.
One Billion Customers by James MacGregor
If a businessman wanted to read just one book to understand how to operate in China, this is it. Pithy, anecdotal it encapsulates a lifetime’s experience as a China pundit and trader, with an invaluable Little Red Book of Dos and Donts at the end of each chapter. Jim tells it how it is.
Historical
A History in Three Keys by Paul A Cohen
A magnificent study of the historiography of the Boxer Rebellion, showing how interpretations of what happened during that tumultuous event transmute according to the perspective of different participants and each future generation.
Mao Zedong: A Penguin Life by Jonathan Spence
No historian has revealed more about China than Jonathan Spence, whether it is the experience of foreigners in To Change China; or the analysis of obscure incidents that reveal the soul and culture of a nation in Treason By the Book and his latest work, Return To Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Ming Man; or his magisterial narrative history of the last three hundred years The Search for Modern China. In this short biography of Mao, Professor Spence casts light on the life, significance and enigma of China’s communist leader with greater incision and insight than any other who has attempted it
The Chinese by Jasper Becker
Jasper has written on all sorts of subjects related to China, Mongolia and North Korea. His history of China’s great famine during the Great Leap Forward, Hungry Ghosts, told a story that was previously little known in the West. In The Chinese he incorporates all his extensive experience as a journalist and years of research into a portrait of a people.
Shanghai by Harriet Sergeant
Harriet’s original research including interviews with survivors from Shanghai’s heyday in the 1930s has produced a cavalcade of a book in which all the various characters - Western, Chinese, Russian - who populated Shanghai and made it the roaring city it was, appear in turn to create a panorama that will live in your mind long after you close the last page. The book is funny, fascinating, tragic and always compelling. It recreates a lost world.
Literary fiction
The Concubine of Shanghai by Hong Ying
Hong Ying was voted last year by China’s bookshops to be one of the best 100 Chinese writers since Confucius as well as being one of the 10 greatest living ones. Her autobiography, Daughter of the River, was the best written and also the most revealing, poetic and also the most hardboiled account of ordinary life during the Cultural Revolution - a must for anybody who wants to understand China. The Concubine of Shanghai, the first volume of her Shanghai trilogy, which is set against the gangster world in Shanghai at the turn of the last century, is an epic of gritty realism, tragedy and poetic atmosphere which tells the story of what the city was really like in its most romantic era. It is being published for the first time in English this year.
The Blue Lotus by Hergé
Hergé never went to China, but this illustrated Tintin adventure captures the atmosphere of the country during the buildup to the Sino Japanese war. I will challenge anybody and say it the best Tintin book he ever wrote. It is also as good, realistic and evocative an introduction to China, as well as being both thrilling, funny and enjoyable, as any book I know.
Detective fiction
The Pool of Unease by Catherine Sampson
In this third volume of her Robin Ballantyne mysteries, this popular crime writer brings her plucky heroine to China and in so doing she meets another great literary creation, the redoubtable detective Song.
GENERAL
Thrillers
The History Book by Humphrey Hawksley
The novel published last year I would take on a train or a plane with me. A thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat from the first page, it is an all too believable account, written by a front line journalist in all the world’s trouble spots, of a Britain that has become a police state after today’s War on Terror has been taken to its logical conclusions. An exciting but also a frightening read which puts Humphrey Hawksley into the top league of thriller writers today.
Historical fiction
Hannibal by Ross Leckie
Not the serial killer with a mask over his face portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, this is the Hannibal of history who took his elephants over the Alps and nearly brought down Rome. There has been a spate of excellent novels about Rome lately (by Allan Massie, Conn Igulden and others) but Leckie’s trilogy is one of the best researched and vividly portrays the darker civilisation of Carthage and the genius of one of the world’s most extraordinary generals. If Scipio, the hero of Leckie’s second volume, had not defeated him, mainland Europe might be speaking a variation of Punic today not Latin.
History
Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross
William Shawcross has recently been writing books on all sorts of subjects including the Iraq War and the Queen but the book I always go back to is his first, Sideshow. Apart from possibly being the best book ever written on the Vietnam conflict, the cynicism, duplicity and tragedy he reveals about America’s bombing of Cambodia have lessons for today.
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Two histories of Russia, one showing the terror of every day life under Stalin’s regime, the other the extraordinary story of how Stalin rose to power. In the year of the millenium people voted for who they thought qualifed for the title of The Man of the Twentieth Century. The optimists said Einstein. The realists said Stalin - and these two authors reveal the dismal years of his black reign more chillingly than any other historians have ever attempted.
A History of the English Peoples since 1900 by Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts brings Winston Churchill’s history up to date. This is not just a history of Britain or America in the Twentieth Century but of every country where English is spoken as a common language. I was once at a dinner in Beijing during which Lady Thatcher spoke forcefully of the virtues of democracy, law and liberty that were unique to Anglo Saxon nations. It led to a heated argument and it is indeed a tendentious question in a politically correct age. Andrew’s book attempts to provide the evidence for this view, seeking the common threads that tie differing cultures together by a common system of values enshrined in our spoken language. This was never more true than during the Second World War when dominions and even colonies joined Britain in a common struggle for liberty, and his argument is that it still holds true today. Whether you agree or not, Andrew’s ebullient style makes for a roller coaster of a read and brings a century to life.
Wishing you a tranquil Christmas
and a Happy New Year
Adam Williams
I lost a friend over the weekend. Kevin Sinclair, author, writer, historian, wine buff and fearless Hong Kong journalist, a legend in his lifetime, who succumbed to cancer at the age of 65.
He was my first news editor when I worked on the South China Morning Post. I’ll never forget his advice to me. It was a dark summer day in 1978. A typhoon was brewing. He’d given me a somosa lunch in the Indian Recreation Club (where I’d been amazed by the flow of anecdotes) and we had just come back into the newsroom, me sitting in front of the typewriter, and him hovering and pacing like some irate, red-faced Chinese God as he put me through the ropes. “You’re writing for an audience of morons,” he spat out in that gravelly voice of his that seemed any moment to be about to erupt into a lava spew of rage (this was before the cancer that deprived him – for a while, until he learned how to roar through a hole in his throat – of speech). “Write down to the bastards.” He continued, spittle flying. “That’s all they’ll understand.” It was characteristically and outrageously phrased, but as memorable an exhortation for clarity in writing that I’ve ever received, and at the age of 24, when this was coming from the terrifying Mr Sinclair, it might as well have been one of the Ten Commandments carved in fiery letters on the stone tablets that Moses was about to hurl at the gilded calf. At that moment I felt like the gilded calf.
“When? What? Why? Who? How? Where?” The pudgy fingers counted down the questions. “If you can’t tell us all that in the first paragraph you shouldn’t be working here. And I’ll fire you, you’d better believe it.” The fearsome eyes rolled as his chin jutted towards me….
Then I saw the humour inside them, and the kindness behind the rough New Zealand badinage….
I can’t say I was under his tutelage for long – only a day in fact, because the next day the typhoon hit, and I as an untrained cub reporter was told to stay at home. When I arrived at the newsroom two days later it was to find that Kevin was no longer news editor. In bits and pieces I picked up the wild, complicated story: something about a storm about to blow the city down and nobody in control of the news desk; consequently a hunt for Kevin through blowing streets and his eventual discovery, floating in eloquence and alcohol, in the bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club; subsequently a sprawling over the door lintel when his minders brought him staggering back into the Morning Post building, while waves lashed the pier outside; then, broken-legged but unhumbled, being carried in state through the hushed newsroom, his fingers raised in a V for Victory sign while roaring that everybody was to be fired (“Why, Kevin?” “For being bloody useless, what else?”), and waking up in the Adventist hospital twenty four hours later into an unimaginable hangover and the sight of a distinctly unamused Editor sitting by his bedside. So the story went, clearly embroidered – or maybe not, but the way we heard it, Kevin then winked at the editor, the severe Mr Robin Hutcheon, and told him “I’ve worked it all out… Golden Dragon for a nose in the third race at Happy Valley on Saturday…. Dead cert….” It was an epic departure! And, for me, because Kevin stayed on as a columnist even if no longer News Editor, the beginning of a long, long friendship and a chance to learn the trade from one of the most professional, if irrepressible, reporters in the business.
And last week Kevin organised another epic departure. His inimitable style remained to the end. Only five days before he died he held a party to celebrate the publication of his autobiography, Tell Me A Story.
It was a strange affair. Looking round the crowded room in the Foreign Correspondents Club, I recognised some familiar faces, but mainly it was a new Hong Kong watching curiously the demise of an old legend. There were moving speeches. The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong S.A.R. Government, Sir Donald Tseng, came for fifteen minutes and sat by his side, while flashbulbs popped and the modern press jostled. His wife, Kit, and their two children spoke humorously, trying not to cry - and Kevin, so shrunken I didn’t recognize him managed to nod and weakly wave a hand at the jokes. The past eight days he had just slept, but he roused himself for this, and they dressed him in a smart green grey suit with an outrageous red tie. Kit told me it could be in a few days, a week.
My God, I thought. Only Kevin would organise a wake where the corpse was still alive! Kevin the newshound scooping his own funeral. The bad boy going out on a party. One by one we sat down by him and were photographed with him. He couldn’t speak, so the shake of the hand and the picture was all. The chance for Kevin to say goodbye to his friends. I was the last to press flesh. He was showing visible signs of tiring, so his family bustled round, and he was lifted into a wheelchair - this once shouting, roaring, typewriter throwing man - and was wheeled away, the eyes which had always shown either mischievousness or belligerence now only revealing the pain of the illness he had fought for so long.
And for the rest of the evening in my hotel room – I’d cancelled plans to go out on the town after that – I could only think what the loss would mean of such a great character and public figure, whose gaping hole in the throat and croaking voice was an emblem of courage (he had fought his cancer, clocking up victory after victory, for THIRTY years). His passing would leave an empty space. Nobody else had recorded the daily ups and downs of Hong Kong as he had. For all his outrageous prejudices and contradictions, his love of sometimes the most dubious heroes (as long as they were colourful that was fine), and his burning sense of social justice that also sometimes clouded his objectivity, Kevin gave us the truth as he saw it. His “Conversations” and his columns and his books together made him a chronicler of Hong Kong that put him in the league of such greats as Maurice Collis, Austen Coates or Dick Hughes. He too had formed our unconscious view of the city we lived in and its history. There was a fighting, irrepressible decency, an enthusiasm about him that underpinned his wild flamboyance and had made him a legend if not an institution since his thirties. He was quite the most brilliant in sheer staying power of all his journalist contemporaries.
But I was surprised also how personally I felt his coming loss. Although I’d not seen much of him in the last 10 years, I suddenly became aware how much of a fixture he had been in my mental landscape. He’d been my mentor (if that is quite the word) when I joined the SCMP, despite the scathing but humorous criticism you got from him, you knew this was a man who would stand by you to hell and back, he was always counted on to be a good table or drinking companion in the decades that followed, and he’d even been the occasional diarist of my own life – my father’s obituary (I was touched to see in Kevin’s autobiography that he counted PG among his ‘Top 10’ friends), my wedding, my son Alexander’s christening at the Jockey Club, reviews of my books when they came out – all had been subjects for Kevin’s tireless pen. He’d dominated an exuberant part of my life. Oh, and at that book launch/wake, how all those memories came flooding back of a time when we all shared the same idealism and sense of adventure and fun. Well, Kevin had maintained those ideals till his dying day.
We’re a proud brotherhood, those many, many people whose lives he touched. And now he’s gone, the world is that little bit smaller and duller. God bless him.
Kevin has left a wealth of books about Asia behind him, including his autobiography, Tell Me A Story (published by SCM