Farewell Hong Kong

• The Mountain of Immoderate Desires by Leslie Wilson
  Weidenfeld, 374 pp, £15.99, February 1994, ISBN 0 297 81371 4

Samuel Pink is brought up in an English country rectory in the 1880s. He knows that the Pinks are not his real father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face.