Patten failed to realise that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t fully understand western democracy. With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading. The end result provides Hong Kong with special status for 50 years, and that one third of the legislative council will be elected from 1997 and half by 2003. Although I do wonder mildly quite what the Orange prize winner in 2005 was like if this was only one of the also rans.

But in this case one has to think that there must have been a better title - "Old Filth" is a slightly offputting title which gives no indication of how terrific this book is. If the British had been more organised and assertive prior to Patten’s arrival, they might have been able to entrench democratising moves within the parameters of the Basic Law. The only ones who don't have a problem are senior management, as at that level the most common spoken language is English. The book lost me, for some reason, along the way, around the time Queen Mary is introduced, and I think the sections with Loss might've benefited from being just a tad less breezy. He retires with his wife to Dorset, she dies (while planting tulips in the garden) and that sends him to revisit people and places from his childhood and youth.

I became rather depressed reading the life of a Raj child rather than finding amusement as I had expected from the book.

With anatomical precision, Gardam reveals that, contrary to appearances, Sir Edward’s life is seething with incident: a “raj orphan,” whose mother died when he was born and whose father took no notice of him, he was shipped from Malaysia to Wales (cheaper than England) and entrusted to a foster mother who was cruel to him. She was awarded the Whitbread Children's Book Award for The Hollow Land (1981) and is the author of A Few Fair Days (1971), a collection of short stories for children set on a Cumberland farm, and two novels for teenagers, A Long Way From Verona (1971), which explores a wartime childhood in Yorkshire, and The Summer After the Funeral (1973), a story about a loss of innocence after the death of a father. Just like in the British HK days, Britons were always the top officials in the goverment of British HK. Old Filth (aka Eddie, the Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feather), is a wonderful creation through which to encapsulate a lengthy period: from the glory days of British Empire, through WW2, and into the present day.I am not a particular fan of fiction that's clever/flashy/gimmicky because far more often than not it signals an author who's insecure, narcissistic, or both and is usually a harbinger of major deficiencies in important aspects like characterization and plot. The pair of them agree that he was no one very much, deserved no more than a brief epitaph: "Laughable . One of the most rewarding things about reading is discovering a character, a piece of history, a perhaps arcane bit of information that somehow finds its way into your life, even if it just leads you to another great book. A reader of Old Filth, despite its unpromising title, will become passionately curious about such matters.

The acronym stands for 'Failed in London, try Hong Kong' and refers to the ease with which below-average candidates have for years walked into jobs with above-average salaries.

per hour), or even dressing as fuzzy creatures to entertain at children's parties ( pounds 20 to pounds 42 a party). Gardam precedes her novel with the quote from an inscription and a dedication, both of which have great bearing on what is to follow.

All the while the British delegates, led by Sir Percy Cradock and later Sir Richard Evans, watched Deng’s deadline approach. something he quietly lived - understandably so - starved for emotional intimacy - the wishes any child wants to feel with their 'own' parents. Her novel Bilgewater (1977), originally written for children, has now been re-classified as adult fiction. We first see eighty-year-old Feathers in retirement in Dorset, England after a long career at the bar in Hong Kong. Tired of the lack of progress in negotiations, Patten passed his reforms in the legislative council in June 1994.This is partly because the the declaration reflected the value that the British placed on Hong Kong. Hong Kong was not the choice for them before the 1990s, Hong Kong was poorer than the UK before the 1990s.