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“... hope. Another way of defining the China phenomenon is to examine one dominant institution, and Frank Ching in Ancestors chooses the family – his own, which he was able to trace back for 900 years. To review almost a millennium of Chinese history through the single genealogical line which leads to a young American journalist does reduce that history ...”

“... dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial while feeling that it was a bad book. Frank Kermode, writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one way of recognising them ‘is by a certain ambiguity in your own response. The Waste Land, and also Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, can ...”

“... meditation and even been given a mantra is understandable because it was done to please Frank Grimes, whom he loved, but that he not only experimented with but appears to have relied on the I Ching seems unlike the man I knew. Lambert reveals that at Oxford he himself had a fling with Peter Brook whom I had ...”

“... and the theory of the five ‘elements’, and its six classic books included the fantastical I Ching while excluding both the book of Mencius and Confucius’s Analects. Nor is it clear that the tao was rediscovered or the glories of Chou revived. Nonetheless, it was a sort of triumph. And in 136 BC the Emperor Han Wu-ti declared Confucianism the official ...”

“... whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.’ This happens to be Frank Judd speaking in the late 1960s, but all that distinguishes it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history ...”

“... Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we are just warming up ... Holding all this together was one of ...”

“... translated the Epic of Gilgamesh (from the Old, or the Standard Babylonian version?), the Tao Te Ching (now Dao De Jing), less well known than its supposed author Lao Tzu (now Laozi), Rainer Maria Rilke (from German, French, or both?) and the Book of Job, Sefer Iiov, which I happen to know quite well but would never dare translate. In any case, Mitchell ...”

“... would come to me for advice with a solemn yet perfunctory insistence, as though consulting the I Ching, and would sometimes volunteer some disconcerting advice of her own. Small, blonde and assertive, she had the unsettling charm of a ferocious nature tempered by a cosy disposition. Jeremy might be described as a professional fan. All his energies had been ...”