Thomas Jefferson famously once said, ‘If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.’ Which is to say that the free flow of information is the lifeblood of democratic policy-making, and that when it disappears or is controlled by self-interested governance, then democracy vanishes with it.

Ordinarily, the Amazon–Hachette battle over revenue streams is not something I would take much interest in: no matter how the fight is framed by the mainstream media, the fact remains the bottom line is all that counts for these corporate entities. But I have been drawn into the fray by happenstance, having recently received my younger brother’s memoirs of his glorious bank-robbing years, along with a request for me to edit the manuscript and see to its publication.

While all kinds of pieces about the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and its aftermath have been written over the years (including interviews with privileged Chinese dissidents lucky enough to make it out of China alive and into teaching posts at prestigious American universities) little – if any – follow-up has ever been done on the two most important figures in that famous image of a man facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square.