“…Siam needed to stand firm within the regional arena, swept by the winds of Western colonialism. Internally, King Chulalongkorn had to legitimize his power and to unify the kingdom by integrating satellite kingdoms into a wider space, the Siamese nation state. …”

“…Searching for answers, Dan Azoulay has turned to a variety of primary sources, in particular letters to the "correspondence columns" of two leading periodicals of the era, Montreals Family Herald and Weekly Star, and Winnipegs Western Home Monthly. Examining over 20,000 such letters, Azoulay has produced the first full-length study of Canadian romance in the years 1900 to 1930, a period that witnessed dramatic changes, including massive immigration, rapid urbanization and industrialization, western settlement, a world war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of young Canadians, and a virtual revolution in morals and manners. …”

“…Raja's book urges a cosmopolitan mode of reading for metropolitan readers, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other. …”

“…"A panoramic history of rules in the Western worldRules order almost every aspect of our lives. …”

“…It analyses the transport situation in the western and eastern European countries, as well as the Baltic States and the CIS. …”