1922: The Birth of Now - Ten programmes in which Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today.

3. The True Story of Ah Q, by Lu Xun. Matthew Sweet and guests, including the writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo and academic and author Gregory Lee, explore the first Chinese modernist short story. Lu Xun wrote in vernacular language, itself a revolutionary act, and created the first existentialist story about a proletarian person. But the revolution does not benefit Ah Q. This text was to influence modernist literature and culture in both China and also Britain, helping to shape the aesthetic style of poets such as Ezra Pound. But Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot would not have been very in interested in the likes Ah Q, the ordinary man.

Reader: Daniel York Loh

Producer: Julian May Show less