David Chipp
Another Aged Survivor Lives to Tell the Tale
The New Emperors: Mao and Deng - A Dual Biography
By Harrison E Salisbury
HarperCollins 461pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
How naïve we were in the mid-1950s. We saw Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues standing on the great Tien An Men Gate reviewing the masses and wrote of the comradeship of those who had endured the Long March and had conquered China. We saw them as austere soldiers who had brought peace to China after decades of civil war.
They lived close by in Zhongnanhai, part of the Forbidden City which was ‘a hidden fairyland of lakes and parks and palaces where Marco Polo strolled and Kublai Khan built his pleasure domes’. Foreign correspondents on a couple of occasions were taken behind the great red walls to this government
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity