Simon Leys — the cosmopolitan scholar who broke the rules of Sinology

‘There’s a new book about China by a fellow called Simon Leys,’ said my history tutor, the late Norman Stone, at the end of one testy supervision in the 1970s, ‘you should go and get it.’ Professor Stone, who seemed to think he had a teenage Maoist on his hands, felt it would improve his student’s perspective.The book was Chinese Shadows. I hurried back from Heffers bookshop clutching the Penguin