Kerry Brown
War & Peace
The City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China
By Jasper Becker
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 370pp £22 order from our bookshop
China: A History
By John Keay
HarperPress 566pp £25 order from our bookshop
This month, Beijing will be a global star. For three weeks during the Olympics, billions of TV viewers, and millions of visitors, will see a city remade at the cost of £20 billion. The capital will be the face of China, inspiring the complex mixture of apprehension and admiration that the whole country now seems to provoke in much of the rest of the world.
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