Governing seemed to be a very difficult business.

I said to myself that governing seemed to be a very difficult business. To pay the troops who kept the dictatorship in power the people were heavily taxed and rendered discontented. This was the position in Khotan. On the other hand, when a government tried to conciliate the taxpayers and be reasonable about levies, it ran short of money and the soldiers revolted, leaving the town open to the depredations of mountain bands – Kashgar’s plight! Which was better? Peter was no interested when I raised the point. He was considering an altogether different problem, which was this: who would win an English law case in which a man, suddenly raised to the peerage as Lord Bognor, brings an action against a poet for writing a tragedy with a hero bearing the hitherto unused name, it being essential for the balance of the poet’s lines to retain the name? 

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 257