Timothy Brook
The Jesuit Who Didn’t Laugh Much
This may be an odd thing for a China historian to admit, but I feel uneasy about claiming Matteo Ricci as my ancestor. His name may be unfamiliar to most readers, but as soon as you enter the field of imperial Chinese history Matteo Ricci will be the second European you meet – after the ubiquitous Marco Polo. Ricci was born in Italy in 1552, three centuries after Polo, and the China he entered – ruled by the Ming, a native dynasty intensely protective of its borders at a time when Mongols, Japanese, and Europeans were doing their best to destabilise them – was very different from the expansive Mongol rule of the preceding Yuan dynasty, when foreigners flowed through China in unprecedented numbers.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3