Chairman Mao considered that the first Emperor of China had been too timid in burying scholars alive – a mere 460 of them compared to the 460,000 he had interred himself. But in the burying of pottery scholars for the afterlife, alongside all the better known warriors and musicians on show in London this summer, the first Emperor of China reigned supreme. According to a new book reviewed by our critic John Keay, a lesser-known fact about this underground terracotta court was that its members were dressed in brightest hues – including two tonnnes of red cinnabar normally reserved for the scholarly ink-pen of the Emperor himself.

These days, a thinker who offends the imperial will of President Putin can also find himself buried away, deep in Siberia, still alive but not too easy to visit. Iain Elliot praises a new book by the Washington-based scholar Leon Aron, which deplores the fate of the dissident tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and points to other monarchical dangers ahead.

A notable achievement of the French Revolution was to replace living burial in the king’s Bastille with a quicker departure under the people’s guillotine. Patrice Higonnet reads a history which gives a more than usual emphasis to the role of public debt in this transformation. In early twentieth century Sarawak, the natives chopped the heads while the English Queen, Sylvia, was fixated on her gin and crown – as Lucy Hughes-Hallett finds out in an imperial biography of “questionable ladies and extremely rum chaps”.

This is the annual edition of the TLS in which we look at the latest developments in Learned Journals. Topics for discussion include Women’s Studies in Tulsa, the theory of Opera in Oxford, old problems in the life of Dr Johnson, a literary paper on the theme of sharing the world with animals, and the compulsive beauty of Baroque and Renaissance emblematica, the “speaking pictures” of their age.

Peter Stothard

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