“Scholars of many disciplines have mined Shanghai’s vast trove of Republican-era pictorial magazines to explore that city’s vibrant cosmopolitan popular culture. Bevan’s Intoxicating Shanghai – An Urban Montage argues for attention to pictorial magazines as a medium in themselves and, specifically, “as a major vehicle for the dissemination of the products of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘high’ cultural circles in Shanghai during the 1930s… [T]hrough meticulous research, Bevan ties the contributors and contents of these two magazines into a rich and mutually resonant network of literary, artistic, cinematic and musical culture that helped define the 1930s as Shanghai’s cosmopolitan “jazz age.”… One can well argue that the resolutely empirical approach informing all of Intoxicating Shanghai is precisely what sets it apart from the other studies of Republican-era Shanghai.”- John A. Crespi, Colgate University, The China Quarterly, Vol. 255, 820-821."Bevan structures his book around the years 1934 and 1935 to highlight a Chinese art and literature scene that is often absent from English-language books that focus on a largely expat Shanghai based in and around the foreign presence [...] This brief stretch of the 1930s brings to mind the short bursts of world-class art and literature in post-2000 China. They sprouted up almost as quickly as they now seem to be disappearing. These examples can give us hope that literature and art, like hope, spring eternal." - Susan Blumberg-Kason, in: Asian Review of Books, 25 July 2020