Dragon-Slayers

Robin, Corey. "Dragon-Slayers." London Review of Books 29.1 (2007): 18-20.

Imagining themselves as ‘dragon-slayers who went enthusiastically into far and curious lands to strange and naive peoples to slay the numerous dragons that had plagued them for centuries’, colonial administrators and secret agents – the empire’s emblematic figures – took on ‘a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow-man and no people for another people’: to protect those who are ‘hopelessly one’s inferiors’...

Atavistic monks and nationalism

Using religion as a talisman of conflict is a bad sign, but this perhaps has more to do with a barely concealed ethnocentrism - Vietnam to send Buddhist monks to Spratly Islands

Waking from a dream

I woke up last night, confused and disorientated. Like Zhuang Zi, I could not determine the direction in which I had been dreaming.

I recalled the various dreams I have lived in and tried to trace a continuity of memory to establish which must be real, but I was tired and scattered.

Kind