The moment I go to bed I switch on the radio to listen to ABC Radio National. Sometime during the night - and I never know when - I fall asleep to the sound of ABC Radio National, and sometime around 3 or 4 a.m., that hour of lowest ebb in the energy of mankind when babies are born and people die (but, thankfully, not I), I wake up again to the sound of ABC Radio National.
And so it was again last night when I awoke to someone called Frank Dikötter talking about his new book "China after Mao" - to listen to the podcast, click here - which was preceded by his books "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe" and "The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957".
Some of my best ideas come to me during the night which is why I used to go to bed with pen and paper on the bedside table when I was still working. I am no longer working and I no longer go to bed with pen and paper, but since my bladder told me that it was time to get up anyway, I switched on the computer and googled Dikötter and "China after Mao".
With a cup of hot ginger-and-lemon tea beside me and my breakfast porridge bubbling away on the stove, I placed the order with ebay. $32.50 is a small price to pay to learn about our masters of tomorrow.
P.S. Available online at archive.org is another one of Frank Dikötter's books, "The Cultural Revolution : A People's History, 1962-1976".
