The Rose of Tibet [antikvár]

The decision to call this book The Rose of Tibet was made at a fairly late date and at the behest of our managing director, Mr Theodore Links. I write 'our' not in the editorial plural, but because I happen to work for the firm. I am an editor of it. I have been an editor, with this and other publishing firms, for eight years. My name is Lionel Davidson.It seems necessary to establish all this with crystal clarity because what follows is, as one of the manuscript readers has written, . . a bit on the weird side'. It is, however, mostly true: it is because it is only mostly true that a few introductory words are called for.Charles Duguid Houston left England for India on 25 January 1950, and returned on 16 June 1951. Interested students can find a report of the latter event in the 17 June issues of the Sunday Graphic and the Empire News, the only two organs who noticed it. (They will have to go to the British Museum Newspaper Library at Colindale, London NW9, to do so, however, since both of these papers, like many of the principals in this story, are now defunct.)He returned on a stretcher, with a sensational story to tell if anybody had been able to get him to tell it. The fact that nobody did is due less, perhaps, to his own discretion than to the interesting state of the world that month.In the month of June 1951, the abbreviated newspapers of the time were trying to cover the Korean war, the sinking of the submarine Affray, the search for Burgess and Maclean, and the iniquities of Dr Mossadeq, whose goverimient was busy nationalizing the oil refineries of Abadan. In England King George VI was convalescing after an operation, in Capri King Farouk honeymooning with Narriman, in Westminster the Minister of Food cautiously forecasting an increase in the meat ration to 2s. 4d., and everywhere a large concern being expressed at the future of Yasmin and who would control it, Aly or Rita. Several murders were committed. The Festival of