“I have lived,” Jhabvala said, “like a cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others’ nests.” The cuckoo is a parasitic bird that deposits its eggs in…
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Category: Uncategorized
Departure(s)
Departure(s), a fiction based on life, is arguably Julian Barnes’s swan song. Now age 80, Barnes is again meditating on old age and death. He…
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Passing Glimpses and Questions on China
Ooi Kee Beng calls his short essays or opinion pieces creative nonfiction. This book, Passing Glimpses of the Present (2026), is a collection of his…
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Law, Religion, and Power
The main theme of The Fall of the Priests and the Rise of the Lawyers by Philip R. Wood (2016) is that religious authority had…
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The Right to Differ
Before the 2-volume biography of Lim Kit Siang by Kee Thuan Chye, there were two biographical sketches of the opposition leader based on questions and…
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Native Americans and Abraham Lincoln
Abe, in history, has been elevated to a god status by many historians. Any human failures of his are embedded in the text and not…
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Fengshui Power in Qing Governance
Tristan G. Brown is one of the emerging Western historians of late Imperial China. He is an assistant professor of history at MIT. His first…
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A Gentleman of the Law
A Gentleman of The Law: Essays in Memory of Tan Yock Lin (2026) The late Professor Tan Yock Lin was my lecturer at NUS circa…
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Lee Kuan Yew at 80
Lee Kuan Yew at 80 (2003) was published to celebrate his 80th birthday. It contains 80 quotes in English and Mandarin. Here are some of…
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Finding the True Tao in Translation
Tao Te Ching is the essential text of Taoism. Composed by Lao Tzu or compiled by more than one hand (the sources don’t agree on…
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