My author Q&A column this month for the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine…. on Kerry Brown’s new book The Great Reversal. Click here to read…
In The Great Reversal, Brown’s intention is to provide British readers with our own China story and an understanding of how and why the West, through Britain, impacted and shaped the east in the form of China. Here Paul French caught up with Kerry Brown to talk Anglo-Chinese relations, the issue of our collective China knowledge (or lack of it) and what we can do about it.
Headed up to Edinburgh to help William Dalrymple launch his new book The Golden Road – I would urge China (and Japan, Korea, SE Asia people) to get a copy and read as it’s an important book about the shaping of the East Asian era in the classical period. We certainly all had fun talking about it…. and if you’d like to watch William’s presentation and the conversation you can online at the Edinburgh International Book Festival site on a ‘pay what you can’ basis – click here
Here a photo of the Russian Monument, taken in 1910, to the Russians killed in the Boxer Rebellion (1900) in Tientsin (Tianjin). After 1917 the Russian’s renounced their extraterritorial rights to a concession in the city.
Now up for pre-order, the UK edition of my next book, Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot & Thompson) – out in November….. click here for amazon and Bookstore.org here
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on the artists Anna Hotchkis and Mary Mulikin. Hotchkis trained in her native Edinburgh, worked in China in the 30s and is perhaps most associated with the artists’ colony at Kirkcudbright in Scotland. Since publishing that article (click to read here) I’ve come across another Hotchkis painting I didn’t know – this one of Hong Kong…
My latest column for Macau Closer magazine is on Daniel Carney’s door-stopper of a novel, Macau, published in 1984. Not perhaps Clavell, but will occupy a long plane/train ride….click here to read
My latest long read for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine is on Maria Wendt, the Shanghai nurse turned drugs mule who smuggled a huge amount of dope into LA, was busted, escaped, recaptured, imprisoned and came to a very sad end while the narcotics ring that lured her in met far more mysterious fates in New York, Mexico City and Shanghai….click here to read
