He is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy, and a visiting research fellow at the LSE’s Asia Research Centre. He is a columnist for the Guardian and the New Statesman.

His interest in East Asia began in 1993 with a holiday in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. After that, he found every reason or excuse he could find to spend time in the region, be it personal, for newspaper articles or television programmes. The most important of these was meeting his wife-to-be, Harinder Veriah, in Malaysia in 1993 who then came to live with him in England the following year. His research on the book started in earnest when he went to live in Hong Kong with his wife and nine-week old son Ravi in 1998. During the following year he travelled extensively in China, Japan and Taiwan but his work on the book was interrupted by the tragic death of his wife on January 2, 2000 at the age of 33. He stayed on living in Hong Kong with his son until March 2001, fighting for an inquest into his wife’s death and then helping to initiate a campaign for the introduction of anti-racist legislation which was finally successful in 2008.

He eventually resumed work on the book in 2005. He was a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University in Nagoya and later a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. In 2005-6 he was a visiting professor at Renmin University, Beijing and in 2006 a visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He completed the final manuscript for the book in December 2008.

Born in Coventry in 1945, he took a first class honours degree at Manchester University followed by a masters degree. He then went to Cambridge University, where he was a member of King’s College, and took a PhD. He subsequently held a lectureship in the Department of Economic and Social History at Bristol University