The week in books | 24 June 2013

This week’s issue of the Spectator is packed with book reviews. Here’s a selection of quotes to whet your appetite.

Old China hand Jonathan Mirsky finds much to applaud in Rana Mitter’s history of the Sino-Japanese war.

‘Into the Fifties, as Mitter outlines, a storm gathered in the US over ‘who lost China’; and those Americans who had praised Mao and had urged Washington to deal seriously with him were vilified — chiefly by Senator McCarthy — as ‘Comsymps’ who had engineered the ‘loss’. All this is well handled by Mitter. But he appears not to know that one significant figure, John Service, a China-born foreign service officer, more than admired the Communist side. During the Chinese civil war, he gave military secrets relating to Chiang Kai-shek’s army to a Soviet agent. He revealed to me years ago, not long before he died, that while at Yanan he knew nothing of Mao’s violence against his critics.