[3] The British sinologist Delia Davin wrote that through that "classic study" and other writings and talks, the Crooks "provided a positive picture of China to the outside world at a time when cold war simplifications were the norm.

"[5] Crook died at 90 after spending his last five decades in China, his political beliefs largely unshaken despite five years' imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

"My father was a Jewish cockney Royalist, raised in the East End of London, by immigrant parents who fled Czarist Russia to avoid anti-semitism and conscription into a pork-eating army," wrote Crook in his autobiography.

[7] Crook was educated at Cheltenham College and graduated from Columbia University in 1935 where he participated in protests on campus against Nazi Germany.

Upon his return to England, Crook re-joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and joined the Royal Air Force, then married Isabel.

[11] After studies at the University of London, the Crooks returned to China to teach English in a rural school that trained staff for the foreign service of the future government.

Crook remarked in his autobiography, written in 1990, that he still believed what he mentioned in his 75th birthday (in 1985) speech: "Some people say they are disillusioned by the negative aspects of Chinese society today.

But Chairman Mao said (in 1949) our past work is only the first step on a long march of 10,000 li ... Over the years I have come to realize that the re-making of a society of hundreds of millions of people, steeped in centuries of feudalism, cannot be accomplished quickly and easily, without setbacks and mistakes.