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Tyler, Christian

Christian Tyler is a former staff writer for the Financial Times and has reported on industry, politics and international trade. He has travelled widely in China and his book, Wild West China, The Taming of Xinjiang, was published in 2004.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [1] 71; [3] 43; [7] 7; [9] 11; [13] 62; [14] 40; [16] 58; [22] 11; [25] 18; [30] 88; [35] 13; [37] 86; [42] 35; [43] 37; [52] 47; [60] 56; [67] 49; [71] 79; [78] 13; [81] 24

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20230601115108 Luke Jennings, Blood Knots, Christian Tyler, SF Issue 78

Hooked on Fish

Christian Tyler on Luke Jennings, Blood Knots

Because they live on an island laced with rivers, ponds and streams, the British are obsessive anglers. Fishermen – and most of them are men – make up a large but secretive society cut off from the rest of us by strange language, obscure controversies and complex motives. Most books about angling are written for specialists: coarse fishers, fly-fishers, sea-fishers. But in Blood Knots (2010) Luke Jennings has broken with convention and employed his great gift for words to explain to baffled outsiders what angling is really about. This is a memoir written for everyone.
20210901100031

Innocent or Not?

Christian Tyler on Rita Monaldi & Francesco Sorti, Imprimatur

Chance put this book into my hands – and I shall be forever grateful to her. Searching for local colour from late seventeenth-century Rome for a project of my own, I came across the Italian historical thriller Imprimatur (2002) by Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti. Whodunnits are not really my thing, but this seemed likely to fit the bill. It had been a hit all over Europe and was favourably compared with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
20200901104550

Progression by Digression

Christian Tyler on Laurence Sterne, The Life of Tristram Shandy

In many ways The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a maddening book. It is funny, of course, but also eccentric, anarchic and longwinded; and it’s hard to understand why it survived to become a classic. Perhaps these days only university students and professors read Tristram Shandy. But for two centuries it was a family favourite. My great-grandfather Walter Congreve discovered it while lying wounded in hospital during the Boer War. He carried it with him – alongside the Bible – through the First World War, to his military command in Palestine and thence to Malta as governor.
20040901164216

Holding the Pass to Paradise

Christian Tyler on V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

Published in 1981, Among the Believers is the account of a journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in 1979, shortly after the Iranian revolution. Its subject, the Muslim fundamentalist revival, was not yet much of an issue inside Britain. (Naipaul made the journey again in 1995 for a sequel, Beyond Belief, but this first encounter with Islam proved to be the more revealing.) Like everyone else, I had been shocked and baffled by the attacks on America. And although I had read a good deal of the torrent of punditry unleashed by the events of September 11, I was little closer to understanding them. Since I was in the middle of writing a book about the Muslim Uighurs of China, I snatched the paperback up.
20040301161610

Sex and Salvation

Christian Tyler on Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

Kazantzakis was a writer whose inner life was devoted to the struggle between flesh and spirit. Although he came within a whisker of winning a Nobel Prize in 1952, his name meant nothing to me when I first picked up Report to Greco at the age of about 22. I do remember, however, being overwhelmed by that sense of recognition which the best writers inspire. Kazantzakis put into words – and such words! – the tumultuous feelings of my youth.
20060301113256 Surrendering Singapore - Christian Tyler on Norman F. Dixon

Blame It on Matron

Christian Tyler on Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

Usually, when I discover a second-hand bookshop, I confine my browsing to one or two familiar categories. Military history is not one of them, nor is psychology. So it was by sheer fluke that I recently came upon Norman Dixon’s book among tottering piles of volumes. The title, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, jumped out at me. Who could resist it? On the way home I wondered why I had found the title so appealing, and why I had felt a shiver of schadenfreude as I handed over my fiver.
20071201171951

The Ruthless Truth of War

Christian Tyler on the novels of Vasily Grossman

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union I was invited to join a private train for its first – and, as it proved, only – excursion, from St Petersburg to Tashkent. Things in Russia had changed a lot, mostly for the worse. The streets of former Leningrad had been commandeered by homeless urchins and men in dark glasses with mobile phones. In a hotel bar, a drunken Red Army veteran pulled a pistol on me. Moscow seemed more dilapidated than ever, but L’Oréal perfume was on sale at the GUM store. As the train puffed south towards the Caspian Sea, blank and hungry faces stared from desolate village halts, and the carriage windows were locked for the passengers’ protection.
20100301120551 Christian Tyler on Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli

In Italy’s Dark Heart

Christian Tyler on Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli

On a motorbike ride across southern Italy in the Sixties, I stopped at an outdoor café in a hilltop village somewhere in the middle of Basilicata. A group of men and boys gathered a few yards away and, with that unnerving look of blank curiosity and suppressed hostility which you sometimes encounter in peasant areas, watched in silence while I drank my coffee. My discomfort ended only when they turned to inspect the much more interesting English motorcycle, a big old 350cc BSA. One of the boys mumbled a comment, and the ice was broken.
20110601144400 Christian Tyler, The Last Bookshop in Europe - Slightly Foxed Issue 30

The Last Bookshop in Europe

Christian Tyler on Dingle Bookshop, Ireland

The white van was seen one morning to draw up in the little car park overlooking Clogher beach, a stormy inlet of the Dingle peninsula in south-west Ireland. Four men in black suits climbed out, edged down the slippery concrete steps and lined up on the beach. Then, as if responding to an invisible signal, they raised their arms in salute over the ocean, and shouted into the wind in a strange tongue.
20161207150343 Photograph, Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago

The Price of Revolution

Christian Tyler on Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

Anyone who was around in the mid-1960s can probably whistle ‘Lara’s Theme’, and quite a few will remember the film for which the tune was written, in which the glamorous Julie Christie and Omar Sharif modelled fur coats in the snow. But how many people today read the book on which the film was based, the literary scoop of the twentieth century, the bestseller that won the Nobel Prize for Boris Pasternak?
20140601124037

Too Hot to Handle

Christian Tyler on Wei Jingsheng, The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings

It wasn’t until the Beijing massacre in June 1989 that I really began to understand what democracy means. At school we learned about the birth of democracy in ancient Athens; as a teenager I read about Stalin’s show trials; as an adult I saw repressive regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at first hand. Reporting on the political scene in Britain during the later stages of the Cold War, I heard the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ liberally bandied about; yet they remained for me essentially political slogans.

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