The ex-Portuguese town of Diu on the island with the same name off the south coast of Saurashtra, Gujarat, is one of the best-preserved and yet least-studied Portuguese colonial towns. Diu was the last of the Portuguese strongholds in India, the control of which was finally achieved in 1539 after many years of futile struggle and frustrating negotiations with the sultanate of Gujarat. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth century Diu remained a main staging post for Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean, but with the appearance of the Dutch, and later the French and British, on the scene the island gradually lost its strategic importance. The town was subjected to little renovation during the nineteenth century while in the twentieth century Diu was no more than an isolated Portuguese outpost with meagre trade until it was taken over by India in 1961. As a result, unlike the other former Portuguese colonies in India – Daman and Goa – Diu has preserved most of its original characteristics: a Portuguese colonial town plan, a sixteenth-century fort and a number of old churches, as well as many of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses.

Detective fiction counts amongst the most successful literary products that the metropolitan west has exported to the world periphery. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War the genre acquired a global presence – both in the form of translations of existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations. This kind of literature represented a prime example of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print entertainment that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass consumption as a social form. Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an expression of modernity. While some literary theorists have pointed to longstanding historical antecedents, detective fiction would not have made sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout, not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter itself – the fact that it is possible to make sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering hidden causal connections through rational enquiry.

The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a given Chinese character may change its meaning when its reading is altered slightly. Modern scholars have sought principles for these changes, and from those principles have reconstructed a skeletal system of early Chinese morphology – with such elements as derivation by tone change, causative infixes, transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arresting fact that some of pre-modern China's linguistically most astute scholars inveighed against the multiple readings on which this research is based. They seem to have held strong opinions, not always made explicit, about precisely how it is that Chinese characters represent language. These two views, modern and traditional, represent fundamentally different models of how early Chinese evolved into modern Chinese.

Research on the subject of Chinese communism has long been marred by the “spotlight approach”, which, as Kathleen Hartford rightly criticises, “illuminates key actors and events, but leaves in the shadow the action transpiring in the corners of the historical stage”. Assuming that only a few great names and signal events bear relevance to its development, such an approach often produces simplified pictures of the Chinese communist revolution. During the last decade or so, however, an increasing number of historians have begun to take seriously the great complexities and diversities involved in this revolutionary movement. Using newly available communist Party sources, they have ventured to excavate forgotten or even deliberately ignored episodes in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In so doing, they have not only expanded the scope of enquiry in Chinese communism but also provided new evidence for testing old interpretive structures. This article joins that trend by presenting the little-known story of the Communist struggle in rural areas of the Guangdong province from 1928 to 1936.

D. N. MacKenzie was a scholar of Middle and Modern Iranian languages who has left an impressive body of publications.