A selection of various audio projects I’ve been involved in that are all free to download….
Available now…. the audiobook of my latest book, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson – is available now and read by the fantastic Laurel Lefkow (here)…
Talking on the excellent Le Carre Podcast with about John le Carré’s 1977 novel, The Honourable Schoolboy…. a fantastic novel that of course takes place largely in Hong Kong and SE Asia
Part One of the conversation is here – We talk about where le Carré got his ideas for the opening scene of the novel, the politics of the time and some F.I.L.T.H. Plus the Hong Kong foreign correspondents club’s urinal?
Part Two of the conversation is here
My latest documentary for BBC radio – Erasing Hong Kong – Hong Kong’s history is being revised and erased – it’s early origins, colonial legacy, post 1997 handover period and the crucial years since the mass 2019 democracy protests are being uprooted, overturned and rewritten by a government guided by the ruling Communist Party in Beijing. This ‘rewriting’ of history is being enforced in schools, universities, libraries, the local media and online. This process has seen library shelves raided, museums closed for ‘review’, art galleries censored, media archives wiped, commemorations and memorials banned. Every department of government seems affected – library users asked to scour the shelves for ‘banned’ books, the arts sector to purge itself of ‘anti-China elements’, the annual commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre shut down. Democracy activists, authors of children’s books, students, and newspaper owners have been jailed for holding contradictory views, telling alternative narratives. All in the few years since 2019 and Covid-19. Hong Kong is a changed place – a place where memory wars are being fought, where history and your interpretation of it can lead to long prison sentences or exile.
Click here to listen…
Now available to download – All 4 episodes of Carry on Kidnapping, the true & bizarre tale of Muriel “Tinko” Pawley’s 1932 kidnapping in Manchuria by bandits, now on RTHK Hong Kong’s podcast site. Evelyn Waugh was gripped, hopefully you will be too –
On the Hong Kong Heritage podcast from RTHK3 talking about Hong Kong’s tradition of ‘delayed modernism’ in architecture, those Shanghai architects & firms that moved south in 49 & how streamline moderne & art-deco evolved into the Bauhaus & Brutalism.
My four-part podcast, The Lady from Hong Kong, uncovering the true case of Miss Seto Gin, arrested for smuggling opium in San Francisco in 1939, who got her into that situation, why escaping a wartorn China made people desparate and what happened to her and her lover/drug kingpin Chung Lei. Recorded for RTHK3 Hong Kong…
My documentary for BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, A Chinese Odyssey, on the Chinese intellectuals who lived in Belsize Park, Hampstead in the 1930s and during WW2…
A superb evocation of the louche underworld of inter war China… Radio Times
Riveting…perfect listening for a long winters night… 5 stars’ Daily Mail
