Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Hilary Spurling is enchanted by depictions of simple family pleasures throughout years of famine and persecution
On the front line of feminism: Claire Tomalin’s memoir reviewed
As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…
China’s brutal one-child policy will be catastrophic for us all
China’s brutal one-child policy was not only inhuman; it will profoundly damage the rest of the world, says Hilary Spurling
The long shadow over China’s only children
This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase,…
John Aubrey and his circle: those magnificent men and their flying machines
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…
Literature's least attractive power couple
This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner…
An enchanted forest of family trees
Michael Holroyd describes the first copy of his last book of memoirs plopping through the letterbox, the kind of moment…
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