It was a clear morning on the Hong Kong waterfront. Three guests had been invited to sit on local market stools to take part in a live round-the-world radio show to celebrate seventy-five years of the BBC World Service. As the BBC person for Hong Kong at the time, I’d invited the guests and arranged the seats and the coffee, expecting some neat little statements about freedom of speech before another day at the office. But no. One of the guests was Jimmy Lai, millionaire and proprietor of the weekly Next Magazine and bestselling newspaper Apple Daily. Jimmy checked, ‘Are we live?’ Then he grabbed the microphone and went dramatically off-piste. He spoke directly to his compatriots in mainland China, calling on them to stand up, speak up and claim their right to democracy. It was spine-tingling radio.

From Mark L Clifford’s compact and competent biography of Lai, it is clear how typical this was. This brash, rough-talking, dope-smoking guy from the mainland boondocks doesn’t play by the rules. Aged seventy-seven, he is currently on trial for violating Hong Kong’s National Security Law. Having already been convicted of participating in an ‘unlawful assembly’, he is now in solitary confinement in a Hong Kong jail, where he will probably stay for the rest of his life.

This poses problems for a biographer of Lai, especially one who cares about Hong Kong and its subjection. Lai has spent many millions of his own fortune and put his freedom on the line for his support of democracy in Hong Kong and China. Clifford, a former member of the