‘the addicts in this country are nearly all instrumentalists in jazz bands’

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The music was played in Soho shebeens which attracted black American servicemen, and Britishers who found palliatives for the bombing in a more exotic range of preparations than were to be found in the public houses. The squad found between 200 and 250 people on the premises at 50 Carnaby Street. The crowd was mixed in sex and race; most of the individuals were aged between seventeen and thirty. Many jettisoned the goods in time. There must have been a small fortune lying around the floor. A lot of cats were arrested and the cloakroom was full of unwanted coats, pockets bulging with hemp. But here’s the real giggle. Someone had unloaded a slab of hashish on a shelf in the kitchen. The law picked it up and looked at it but thought it must be some kind of meat extract. So the man got his hash back. Ronnie Scott was less fortunate. Playing a Charlie Parker tune with his eyes shut, he received a rude shock on opening them to find his field of vision almost blocked by a large uniformed sergeant. He had to leave it to the law to remove the cocaine from his wallet.

‘Was I sexually adequate for Her Majesty’s overflowing carnality?’

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Neither those who knew him in his lifetime, nor those who read about him afterwards, were willing to see him as so heroic a liar. Scholars and administrators, journalists, publishers, lawyers, diplomatists, industrialists - all at first, and some to the last, were taken in by him. They agreed with Mr Kent of Tientsin, who found it inconceivable that any man of sense could doubt his complete veracity. We who have seen him palming off forged scrolls on libraries, forged contracts on manufacturers, forged ‘curios’ on individuals, forged letters of recommendation, forged reports of high-powered interviews, imaginary arms, imaginary battleships, imaginary libraries, imaginary pearls, all explained by elaborate, detailed, self-glorifying fantasies - flotillas of ships stealing down the Yang-tse river, carts laden with rare books creaking slowly through bandit ridden provinces, nocturnal armed raids on the imperial palace, secret meetings with the great - may well feel differently ... In Europe, he appears as a man of letters, in China he is a privileged observer who is adopted into the imperial court. But these scenes of literary, social and courtly life provide only the colouring of the story: its internal unity, its only organizing principle, is not social or literary but sexual. Both volumes are grossly, grotesquely, obsessively obscene. Backhouse presents himself as a compulsive pathic homosexual who found in China opportunities for indulgence which, in England, owing to repressive laws and Victorian hypocrisy, could be only dangerously and furtively enjoyed; and in his old age, he clearly derived an exquisite lubricious pleasure from minutely and unctuously describing every detail of such perversions.

sinks of iniquity, where orgies of the worst kind were openly carried on.

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I was getting fed up with life in England. There was too much sameness about it; a place where there is little real freedom, and where one had to do just as the next fellow did. To wear the same kind of clothes with a collar and tie, and talk about football and horse-racing, making conversation for the sake of talking … I had always had a desire to see things that were new and strange; to look below the surface, and find out how the world lived; to have new thoughts, and see new places … Whatever country I have resided in, I have always made it a practice to become friendly with the natives, and by this means I have seen more of the hidden side than I would have done otherwise … There were places where a European would not be alive five minutes unless he was accompanied by a Chinaman who was known. The fumes of opium smoking met one at every turn. They issued from the open doors of houses and shops, and the very air seemed to be flavoured with a smell of burning opium … Gradually the music changed; it became quicker and louder in tone, and the movement of the dancers followed suit; they danced with more abandon, while at every change of the music they cast off some garment. The music became quicker still, and the girls were quite naked now. The shape of their bodies was a wonder of perfect anatomy, and their motions, swift and lithe; reminding one of the movements of some animal of the cat tribe. The rhythmic motion of their bodies became almost a frenzy.