Greed

In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust novels is how much they make us feel – about the tie between characters and their daemons, the fear of Lyra’s sinister mother Mrs Coulter, the love between Will and Lyra, the protectiveness of the courageous pot boy Malcolm Polstead… The driving emotional force that carries us through The Rose Field is our

‘A fact that confounds me now when I think back on it,’ writes the acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh at the start of this expansive and thoughtful book, ‘is that for most of my life China was for me a vast, uniform blankness.’ There were many reasons for this, he says. The war between India and China in 1962 might have played a part, along with the complex relationship between the two countries since then; but also the way that ‘an inner barrier’ has been ‘implanted in the minds’ of many around the world – one that blocks out China but allows in the ‘language, clothing, sport, material objects and