Джон Кеу (John Keay)
JOHN KEAY’S books include India Discovered, The Honourable Company, Last Post: The End of the Empire in Far East, the two-volume Explorers of the Western Himalayas, India: A History, The Great Arc, Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East and Mad about the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia. He is married with four children, lives in Scotland, and is co-author with Julia Keay of the Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland.
From the reviews of China: A History:
‘Much of [China’s] past, by any standard, is awe-inspiring. Not just for the temples, palaces and terracotta armies that remain, but for the earliest books and scripts – and poems – that underpin the beginnings of true civilisation . . . Anybody fascinated by the puzzle of what comes next for our frail, perplexed planet will find unexpected answers in this crisp, often witty chronicle of amazements: for what comes next, as the Chinese know, is also what came up in the dynasty before last’
Observer
‘Ambitious . . . [this] book has many virtues, not least its refusal to adopt a Eurocentric perspective. It also reminds us that to talk of one China, or one Chinese history, is absurd . . . China’s past was contested and fragmented. Intoxicatingly interesting’
Independent on Sunday
‘An epic history of China . . . As China begins to dominate the contemporary world order a comprehensive record of this vast nation, its extended ancestry and distinctive culture is particularly timely. There’s no way of understanding China’s stirring future without a sense of its awe-inspiring past’
Traveller magazine