“One might ask,” begins Riaz Dean in the introduction to his new book The Stone Tower: Ptolemy, the Silk Road, and a 2,000-year-old Riddle, “how this book is different from the many others about the Silk Road.”
Nearly a decade ago, archaeologists at Wadi al-Jarf on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast found a cache of papyrus fragments dating from the reign of the 4th Dynasty King Khufu (Cheops), he of the Great Pyramid at Giza, dating from 2633-2605 BCE. These fragments appear to be the “oldest written documents” ever found (document meaning material…
Felipe Fernández-Armesto doesn’t think much of Ferdinand Magellan. Particularly galling is that the famous explorer’s “renown seems impregnable” despite the fact that “his failure was total”.
It’s 1951 and Jean-Luc Guéry, a perpetual ne’er-do-well, has arrived in Saigon from his native Côte d’Azur to look into the as yet unsolved murder of his brother. Guéry, a hack reporter for the regional Journal d’Antibes, has a fondness for alcohol and a weakness for gambling. His brother, on the other hand, was running…
The Mediterranean, the body of water that now divides and buffers Europe from the “over there” of Africa and the Middle East, used (many centuries ago) to unite a region. The “Mare Nostrum” of the Romans was a conduit for internal commercial and cultural communication. And for several centuries prior to becoming a Roman lake,…
At this time of shifting geopolitical relationships—“decoupling” between China and the US, rapprochement between China and Russia—it is unsurprising that the cultural and intellectual as well as political history of these relationships has attracted increasing attention. Recent volumes on Sino-Soviet “internationalist” interaction is now joined by Arise, Africa! Roar, China!, Gao Yunxiang’s recent study of…
The conceit of Tulip of Istanbul is that it was “found” as an 18th-century handwritten Ottoman manuscript at a stamp and rare book auction. The arrival of the novel itself is almost as serendipitous: originally published in Turkish in 2009 and then in English in 2015 (also curiously published in Turkey), it is now available…
As India emerges into independence in 1947, Englishman Charlie Strongbow and 23 colleagues set about setting up a smuggling operation on the previously uninhabited Cross Island, just off Bombay’s Ferry Wharf. The aim is to supply the good and the great (and the not-so-good) with contraband cigarettes, cheese, booze, perfume and whatever other Western products…
Although Gideon Defoe’s An Atlas of Extinct Countries, described by the publisher as “Prisoners of Geography meets Bill Bryson”, is glib and on occasion snarky, it overlays a serious and topical point: what is a country, what are borders and who says so? “Treating nation states with too much respect is maybe the entire problem…
Sergei Tretyakov is on something of a roll. The Soviet writer has featured in several recent books, including a new translation of (among other plays) Roar, China!, a new biography and a study of the Soviet-led drive for a “Leftist Literary Commons”. He also is a main character, arguably the protagonist, in Edward Tyerman’s Internationalist…
Chifa. The word may not immediately register with visitors, but once said out loud, the origins of the term for the ubiquitous Chinese restaurants in Peru are obvious to anyone with even a smattering of Cantonese. Arroz chaufa soon becomes recognizable (if somewhat redundant) as fried rice. Once the surprise wears off, it is of…
It is an accident of history that most information technology, from Morse Code to the Internet, was developed in and for English-speaking countries. English, with just 26 letters and no accents or diacritical marks, means that everything from keyboards to displays to internal character codings are simple, deceptively so, because almost no other language makes…
It is somewhat inexplicable that it has taken more than 35 years for Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party to show up in English. The book was serialized in 1984 and published the next year, winning the Mao Dun Prize and adapted into an 8-episode series for television. Popularity can be the result of hitting a…
The ubiquity of Portuguese surnames in Hong Kong, including as they do quite a few people who don’t look particularly European, can come as something of a surprise. Some of these, as Catherine S Chan points out in her new book Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting, date literally from…
Graphic novels are taken more seriously in Europe than in the English-speaking world, and so it is perhaps not surprising that The King of Bangkok, a socio-political-historical narrative based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Claudio Sopranzetti, first appeared in Italian. Although a “novel” in the sense it’s fictionalized, the elements (say the…