Quotes from Christopher Frayling

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.

The popular visual imagery of China, as The Times correspondent suggested, came from pantomime and music hall in pre-cinema days; together with comics, press and book illustrations. Reminiscences by visitors to China sometimes noted that this was how they actually saw Peking when first they arrived. Then they discovered that the pantomimes were really about England in fancy dress.

he always stressed that 'one could go down from floor to floor far below street level and find … yellow warrens'. A literally underground culture, already a journalistic cliché.

Having failed the Civil Service entrance examinations, he had become – she recalled – a clerk at the London office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on 31 Lombard Street, at the age of eighteen – one of his 'fellow employees' there had been the young P. G. Wodehouse

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on her visit to Beijing back in September 1982, had encountered a similar problem: the interpreter was heard to call her 'The Quite Honourable Margaret Thatcher'. On the other hand, she took some persuading to stop using the word 'Chinamen'.