The “wars” in the title of Guy Laron’s new history of the past century and a half are as much metaphorical as literal; few readers will need much convincing of his thesis that “energy is one of the core instruments of geopolitics.” There is much to be said for Laron’s adopted lens. Oil provides a…
“Under the Wave Off Kanagawa”, popularly known as “The Great Wave”, is without a doubt the most celebrated Japanese woodblock print. It is also the most recognised work of Japanese art tout court. Ask anyone with an interest in the genre and they will tell you that it was made by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) which,…
Iranian tradition held that the first, ancient dynasty of kings had mastered all the useful sciences, from astronomy to medicine, and recorded them in books of wisdom. Some claimed the prophet Zoroaster himself to be the ultimate author. These books were well guarded in the great palace we call Persepolis. In one terrible night of…
Until she was forty-three years old, Aya Kōda (1904-1990) was known primarily for being the daughter of the novelist Rohan Kōda, who was influential in the development of early modern literature in Japan. Yet after Rohan’s death, a publisher asked Aya to write a memoir about her family, and she soon proved a force in…
History, or least the writing of it, does not remain confined to academia or historians; it can increasingly become a matter of public debate. When it comes to India, debates about the past can be bitter, not just in one-off spats but as a constant source of tension between the ends of the political divide….
In Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the wannabe aesthete Monsieur Jourdain learns with delight that “for more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it!” A similar sentiment arises when reading Prudence Leung Kwok Lau and Vanessa Winghei Yeung’s Hong Kong Art Deco Architecture: it seems that—except for the very few Hong…
This century’s “forever wars” have nothing on the Crusades, which lasted some three centuries and had to be numbered. Lay interest in the Crusades seems to diminish after the clash of heavy hitters Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third and the disrepute engendered by the Fourth, in which the Franks turned on their…
The word yakuza has its own history, and it is not what most readers assume. Kabuki theatre and popular fiction gave the word its start, with a stock character called a yakuza-mono: an outlaw or drifter who lived off the gambling tables. The literal meaning is close to “a useless one” or “a bad one”,…
Can a painting outlive its authenticity? For art lovers and collectors, an artwork’s value is often inseparable from its status as a singular object. This is why the authenticity of the Mona Lisa is of paramount importance to the Louvre Museum. The painting’s “value” comes not just from its visual qualities, but it carries with it the…
As are many things regarding China’s developing place in the world, the “Belt and Road Initiative” (or BRI)—the term used for China’s international infrastructure investment programme—is contentious. Discussion about the programme’s objectives and efficacy are almost inevitably coloured by one’s geopolitical view of “China’s rise”. Those who are discomforted by the latter are prone to…
A near-desperate Chinese migrant mother, long estranged from her own cultural inheritance, takes her British daughter to China before adolescence makes history lessons an even harder sell. In Xi’an, they squat beside a flowerbed, sharing half a watermelon while the mother tries to bring ancient dynasties to life. The daughter spits out a few seeds….
The rise of Japan as a world power in the early 20th century produced in Great Britain a rethinking of geopolitics and world order. It marked a shift from Eurocentrism to a more global approach to thinking about world politics. Japan’s stunning victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, Cambridge professor Chika Tonooka…
For anyone who grew up on British and Hollywood war films of the 1950s to the 1980s, Percy Herbert’s face is instantly familiar even if his name is not. He turns up in The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Wild Geese and dozens of others: the reliable “oh, that guy”…
In the 1930s, up to 20,000 European Jews turned to Asia for refuge before Japan entered the war as an Axis ally. Shanghai was the best-known destination, but the Philippines also played host to hundreds of German-speaking Jews. Mark Sy recounts this lesser known example of geopolitical empathy in The Manila Poker Club: Eisenhower, Quezon,…
The British Indian Overseas Territory is the sort of place only a stamp-collector will have heard of. It’s more commonly and better known as Diego Garcia, in fact the largest of a group of islands (the Chagos Archipelago) smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and home to a major US military base…