Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix X 敘 ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ This is the famous opening line of Joan Didion’s 1979 The White Album, a series of autobiographical essays about the 1960s.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix IX 蛻 During my first trip to New York in the northern autumn of 1986, my then-partner Linda Jaivin and I picked up a copy of Hans Askenasy’s Are We All Nazis?… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Chapter I 比肩 Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers… — from ‘V.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, Appendix VII 懼 ‘It will need the whole of Europe to keep those gentlemen within bounds.’ — Frederick the Great on the Russians
quoted in Norman Davies
Europe: A History, 1997, p.649 In response to a visit to Babyn Yar (Ru.: … Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, Appendix V 見   The arrival in Beijing of Richard Nixon on the morning of 21 February 1972 was the lead story on the ABC evening news in Sydney, Australia.… Read