Revisiting Great Expectations: Part 1

The start of the affair
25 July 2008
I have always had a soft spot for Great Expectations, Charles Dickens’s final masterpiece, which I first read as a set text for my English Literature GCSE. Most of the books I had to read for English class at school were somehow made much less enjoyable by the simple [...]

CDS essay: Neither good nor bad enough

Neither good nor bad enough
11th January, 2007
I occasionally wish that someone would just publish the novel “Red Flower Swans of the Sky Daughter Falling” and get it over with. If the title sounds curiously familiar, then it is because Chinese expatriate Literature has been such a success story. And at its heart is one big [...]

London pleasures

Speak, memory…
October 2005
New home, new job, old (returning) friends and old problems.
It is a funny feeling to go into a new job already knowing that it was the wrong choice. No matter how much I tried to convince myself, being a consultant is just not for me. Hours and days and weeks went by, and [...]

Nature

As draining as it has been to watch events unfold in Asia since Boxing Day, what has made the tragedy worse for me is the sickeningly patronising attitude of the coverage on TV. First, the phrase “the following report may contain images that some viewers may find disturbing” is really getting on my nerves. I [...]

My Year

YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
- Ambrose Bierce – The Devil’s Dictionary
I used to have a superstition that even numbered years have always turned out better or luckier for me. However, the correlation seems to have broken down the past year. In comparison to 2003, this year felt as if everything [...]

The GRE

An A-level student would do better than me at the GRE would right now. Having spent the morning browsing their exam preparation software that incidentally mangles my display settings so the answers do not appear correctly, I have come to the conclusion that I will need to regress to the level of schooling achieved at [...]