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.
I first visited the city in 1991, and lived there for three years from 2000. It is not an easy place to love, and it puts its best face forward reluctantly. In line with the massive project of modernisation that has overwhelmed the rest of China, Beijing was first redesigned
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
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete