In January 1980 a young police officer named John MacLennan committed suicide in his Ho Man Tin flat. His death came mere hours before he was to be arrested for committing homosexual acts still, at that point, illegal in Hong Kong. But this was more than the desperate act of a young man, ashamed and afraid; both his death and the subsequent investigation were a smokescreen for a scandal that went to the heart of the establishment.
Nigel Collett’s A Death in Hong Kong: The MacLennan Case of 1980 and the Suppression of a Scandal has won the 2017 Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong History Book Prize.
The Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong has launched AsiaGlobal Online, a new journal focusing on “policy-relevant insights on global issues and from Asian perspectives.”
Arguably the most successful Western opera singer to come out of China, soprano He Hui is known for her roles in Madama Butterfly, Tosca and Aida.
Here is an unsystematic survey of “best books” lists and a highly unscientific indication as to where Asian books appear in the radar on the mainstream English language press. Only relatively long lists were chosen.
A tour around the region’s past and present in books: some high notes of the past year.
A selection of photos from Musica Viva’s “La Bohème”, December 2017.
The Circassian sounds like the name of a film; there’s more than enough material here for one. Eşref Bey, or Eşref Kuşçubaşı or any of the other names by which he went, played many roles in his life: brigand, family man, military leader, spy, rebel. He crossed paths if not quite swords with TE Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—with whom he is sometimes compared. But in spite of Eşref’s fame—or notoriety—information on him seems hard to come by in English; he does not even seem (at this writing) to have a Wikipedia page.
The Asian Review of Books is highlighting works of authors appearing at the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival later in the Spring. This list will be updated regularly as we get get closer to the festival opening, so bookmark this page and check back. Recent additions include an a new essay from Ece Temelkuran, an extract from Louder than Hearts, poetry by Zeina Hashem Beck, a review of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and a review of and excerpt from The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains by Choo Waihong.
Watching a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello in the current political climate can be profoundly depressing.
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