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“... Most great writers, if only in indirect ways, offer some representation of their own life, but the biographer faces a particular problem where interpretation has already been shaped by his subject in autobiography. Wordsworth was not the only writer of his period to dislike the public appetite for private information, or to seek to forestall the biographer’s ‘abominable use’ of letters and personal anecdote by trying himself to control what should, and should not, be offered to the public ...”

“... In the days of the Boxer Rebellion, when Chinese wore pigtails and exposure to foreign values was compulsory, they knew that Westerners were Chinese upside-down. As Yang remarks in The Miraculous Pigtail, which is set in that period: ‘Chinese shave their heads, foreigners their faces; Chinese write from right to left, foreigners from left to right; Chinese call the compass the “needle for fixing the south”, foreigners call it the “needle which points north”; Chinese have their tea-cup lids on top, foreigners have their, tea-cup lids underneath ...”

“... China must go forward; you shouldn’t dwell on what’s past,’ an American told me in Beijing last summer. He had decades of experience in China, and I could see what he meant, from a Chinese point of view. But from a Western one, Tiananmen does need to be revisited. If the bookstalls in Beijing offer only grossly biased accounts of ‘the Beijing turmoil’, at least few read them and fewer still believe them: the Chinese press is government-controlled ...”

“... possible that the new sensibility in architecture is only one aspect of a general cultural change. Philippa Tristram’s Living Space makes a convincing case for just such a general shift during the earlier Palladian/Picturesque transition. A particular example from the borderland where constructions of bricks and mortar and those of the mind coexist ...”