After wartime and immediate post-war service in the British Navy, Verner Bickley served in the Colonial Education Service in Singapore and then in Burma, Indonesia and Japan as a British Council Officer. For ten years, he was Director of the Culture (and Language) Learning Institute at the East-West Center in Hawaii before joining the Hong Kong Government in 1983 as Director of its Institute of Language in Education (1983-1992). He has had extensive radio and television experience with the former BBC Far Eastern Station in Singapore; the NHK in Japan and radio and TV stations elsewhere. In Singapore, he acted in over thirty “Sunday Night Theatre” productions and wrote and “anchored” a weekly television programme for the NHK in Tokyo. In Hong Kong, he played cameo roles in three Chinese language films, Bodyguard from Beijing (Jet Li), Thunderbolt (Jackie Chan) and City of Glass (Leon Lai) and appeared in the crowd surrounding Jeremy Irons and Gong Li in The Chinese Box. Bickley has adjudicated at Speech, Drama and Debating competitions in several countries - many times in mainland China. His publications include Cultural Relations in the Global Community (with John Philip); Searching for Frederick; Language and the Young Learner in Hong Kong; Decoding the Olympics (five books), and Forward to Beijing. His autobiography, Footfalls Echo in the Memory, was published in London and New York in February 2010. [Read]