For two decades of my life, I worked as a senior executive with first Rupert Murdoch and then Kerry Packer. These were challenging years, not without their hairy moments, but I always felt my best way of retaining any kind of perspective at that time was to conceive of myself as a bit player at the court of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century monarch.

Bruce Dover, in the 1990s, was attached to the court of the Sun King (aka Rupert Murdoch) at the time when he was attempting to negotiate a series of treaties with the highly exotic imperium headquartered behind the walls of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Dover sees with great clarity all the jockeying for position and for favouritism on the Chinese side; but he does not seem to see quite as clearly the mirror image of that struggle – the jockeying at the Murdoch Court. Nonetheless, from his position of considerable advantage, he has a mighty tale to tell that is both riveting and revealing.