Similarly, Mammon Inc allows the author to register her impressions -- equally apt and equally satiric -- of contemporary life in both Oxford and the fastest of New York's fast lanes.
Singapore features prominently in this collection generally. Nigel Barley's In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles retraces the career of the Lion City's founding father, for instance. But Frank Owen's The Fall of Singapore is another matter.
Originally published in 1960, this book sounds the one sour note in the series. Its attitudes are unambiguously chauvinistic and anti-Japanese.
Instead of taking what would surely be the appropriate stance these days of historical neutrality, it instead demands to know why "the Japs" (a frequently repeated term) were allowed to overrun this jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
If this was in dubious taste in 1960, it is surely totally unacceptable today. This is one book Penguin should never have added to an otherwise commendable series.
There is nothing wrong with Simon Winchester's tour up the Yangtze, The River at the Centre of the World, first published in 1996. Winchester is a reliable, hard-working writer, and with its extended observations and historical digressions, this is acceptable reading, though with little of the skepticism of a Thubron or the elan of a Theroux.
And it's a mark of Paul Theroux's pervasive talent that even when he's not on top form he's still immensely entertaining. Included here is the novel he wrote to coincide with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Kowloon Tong. It's not one of his finest creations, much inferior to Hotel Hawaii, My Other Life and a string of others. But even so it captures many of the more insalubrious aspects of Hong Kong with what feels like effortless ease.
The list is completed with George Orwell's, Burmese Days, dating from 1934.
Orwell's reputation has fallen somewhat in recent years. With his over-plain style, his humdrum subject-matter, and his half-concealed self-righteousness, he's less compelling now than he was when the claims to invincibility of the political left (of which he was the hammer) were at their strongest. It became his fate to delineate, in two depressing masterpieces, the face of 20th century totalitarianism in its most loathsome form.
But he began life in the UK's colonial police force in Burma, and this first novel exposes the pretensions of the expatriate British in no uncertain terms. It remains less than "essential" reading, however. His single essay, A Hanging, in which a stray dog jumps up to lick the faces of both the condemned Burmese man and the be-medalled officials, damns human self-importance and role-playing, in Burma and anywhere else, far more effectively in just a few pages.
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