far, far too late in the early morning (is that weird?) to be reading about Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War.

in the library earlier today (yesterday argh temporal confusion thing) -- read an article by Warren Cohen on the 'lost chance' of the US to get China on its side in 1949 -- Cohen wrote that in the 1960s he had wrote an article saying there was a lost chance, and later Nancy Tucker wrote a book with better arguments for the same thing. He said that some called it a Cohen-Tucker thesis. And in a footnote he says that the idea of a Cohen-Tucker thesis was helped by Cohen's marriage to Tucker some years later...and that to the disappointment/surprise of friends and critics and suchlike, they do not have any children or pets named after Dean Acheson. :)

the Kermode quotation is stolen out of Su-Lin's brilliant essay on fairy-tales and women's writing (erm hope you don't mind :). Right. Before this night is much older I *must* progress beyond Mao's 'lean to one side' speech.