The era of Little Red Book was over, its power gone. Only the memory remained. Listen to the documentary Mao's Little Red Book Goes West on Radio 4, Friday 5 February at 11am and then online.

Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, taken from the pocket-sized, vinyl-bound “little red book” that swept the world in the late 1960s, must represent one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the ...