As with most twentieth-century Chinese writers, little is known of Ts’ao Yü’s life. Though his ancestral home was Ch’ien-chiang 潛江, Hupei province, he himself was probably born in…

The novel he lends his name to is an account of that life, taking more or less the form of a memoir set down in the years immediately after World War II by an old man mentally prep…

There are some glittering stats out there regarding Brassey: namely that he'd built around one-third of Britain's railways by the time he was in his early 40s, and that by the time…