Piers Brendon
Never the Twain Shall Meet
A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign Colony
By Julia Boyd
I B Tauris 288pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
‘When China awakes, the world will tremble.’ This warning, attributed to Napoleon, became a commonplace during the Victorian era. China was a sleeping giant with the potential to regain the pre-eminent place it had once occupied in the world. It was a slumbering dragon which, with a mere flick of the tail during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, threatened to exterminate all the foreign devils in Peking. Writing in that year, Sir Robert Hart, inspector general of the Chinese customs service for over forty years, prophesied that within a century China could become ‘the most powerful empire on earth’.
Julia Boyd begins her absorbing study of the alien community in Peking during the first half of the twentieth century with a dramatic account of the assault by the Boxer rebels on the legation quarter. This was another forbidden city inside the massive red walls of the capital, a privileged
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
Twitter Feed
‘Miłosz was from first to last negotiating how poetry ... can “bear” the suffering all around without falsifying it. His was an austere vision of the poet’s calling.’
Rowan Williams on the life and work of Czesław Miłosz.
Rowan Williams - The Poet’s Burden
Rowan Williams: The Poet’s Burden - On Czesław Miłosz: Visions from the Other Europe by Eva Hoffman
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruler of Gwalior ‘named his son George after the British king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur ... boasted a collection of six hundred dildos, which Pakistan’s generals solicitously buried when they deposed him’.
@pratinavanil on India’s Maharajahs.
Pratinav Anil - Midnight’s Playboys
Pratinav Anil: Midnight’s Playboys - Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki
literaryreview.co.uk
Dec’s Silenced Voices section of @lit_review features the scandalous criminalization of prominent 🇲🇪 academic Boban Batrićević (Faculty of Montenegrin Language & Literature)
His hearing for writing about hateful narratives spread by the Serbian Orthodox Church is on Jan 22nd
⬇️