Jonathan Mirsky

In the spring of 1972 I met what I still think was the bravest man in China. An ordinary factory hand, he told me that the officially invited American China academics, of whom I was one, who the previous day had been brought to his ‘typical workers’ house’ in Canton, had been told a pack of lies by him and his family. In essence it was a Potemkin flat in which none of the new-looking things — TV, bicycles, kettles, even the bedding — belonged to the family. They lived near by in typical squalor. I had re-met him by chance very early the next morning and this daring Chinese invited me into his real flat and astounded me by telling me about his real life.

It is a mark of the excellence of this memoir by the highest-ranking woman in American history, ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that it could not have been written by a man. Imagine Douglas Hurd saying that the happiest years of his life were with a spouse who dumped him for a younger woman and that if he could have kept his wife he would have given up a public career. In his recent memoir, in fact, Mr Hurd skates past his divorce, while the serialisation of her book and recent interviews with Ms Albright have mentioned barely anything else. Or imagine a male foreign minister saying, after days and nights of negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians, ‘I had eaten so much junk food in nine days I had trouble fitting into my clothes.

In a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed 'How I long for the bombs to start falling,' Mark Steyn wrote, 'This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone's sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it on, please.' I don't know whether the Telegraph or The Spectator will be sending Steyn to Iraq, but this is what he may find. The description, in Jarhead, is by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine Corps sniper in the last Gulf war. Marching across the desert he comes on what is left of an Iraqi convoy which had been bombed by the Americans: 'Men are gathered dead around what must have been their morning or evening fire.

In this exploration of her pain, terror, and ten years of barely surviving the trauma of rape and near-murder, Susan Brison's most piercing words are, 'For months after my assault, I had to stop myself before saying (what seemed accurate at the time),.

Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole - in short, the world. He is 'certain' that if there hadn't been a disastrous fire in Peking's Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor to lose interest in long-range exploration, 'China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world'. Furthermore, Mr Menzies suggests, had there been no fire New York might now be called New Beijing, and Buddhism not Christianity might 'have become the religion of the New World'.

Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin's earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning it by listening to the World Service, came to the US in 1985 when he was 29. Waiting won the National Book Award. One of the reasons I liked that book was Ha's creation of a world in which people acted naturally, like real Chinese, as their gripping story unfolded. The problem with The Crazed is that the same Chinese habits are there, right down to smells, noises and stains, but the story, such as it is, plods.