The Great Game : On Secret Service in High Asia

Far from exhaustive but certainly exhausting to read, this history of England and Russia skirmishing over who gets to be in charge of central Asia was fascinating. 500-odd pages and one only skims the surface. The sheer grit of the early explorers is astonishing- facing horrible conditions and alien cultures with the proverbial stiff upper lip. I learned a lot about the history of the area but came away thinking that nothing has changed even though the territory's been disputed forever. Same as it ever was... ( )

To be paired up with [b:Kim|210834|Kim|Rudyard Kipling|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51iY8rFHXnL._SL75_.jpg|1512424].

Reading Rudyard Kipling's Kim has me looking for a nonfiction book about the Great Game, the 19th / 20th century proto-Cold War between Russia and the US over control of Central Asia. (At least, it was something like that. I haven't read the book yet.)

Internet research seems clear that this is THE book to go with. Fun and influential, if slightly pro-British (a problem no other book I found seemed able to solve).

Swashbucking adventure in Central Asia. And it's all real history! From the Pashtuns to the Mongols, from the British to the Czar. This book is a traveler's adventure. ( )

I liked this a lot, although I think the relevance to events today has been overplayed a bit by some other reviewers: it's better enjoyed as a stirring history than a political primer.

I knew a little about the Great Game before – that 19th-century wrangling over Central Asia between Britain and Russia – but I hadn't appreciated before how motivated both sides were, in Britain's case because they feared encroachment on their ‘jewel of the Empire’, British India, and in Russia's case because they were hell-bent on expanding their influence as far as possible. But the real joy here is in the Boy's-Own adventuring of some of the principal players – ambitious explorer-spies who headed off the map and into a world of mountain fortresses, Himalayan snowstorms, Russian ambushes, gruelling sieges, and daring gunfights. At stake was a barely-known network of independent city-states whose rulers were befriended, betrayed, and played off one another by the two major powers in an attempt to win influence and ascendancy in the area.

It would take a hard-hearted reader not to feel some pangs of awe and excitement at some of the derring-do here, however much you are made aware of the cynical political game-playing behind it all. Hopkirk tells his story engagingly, if occasionally dropping into some speculative scene-setting (‘As he donned a long quilted coat and black lambskin hat, the two men with him watched in silence’ – how do you know?). There are narrative problems – it covers a long period, and the book is necessarily somewhat episodic, with rather little of the political background filled in – but on the whole, the episodes are so extraordinary that it's hard to mind too much.

I'd be interested to see a update of some of this – when it came out the Soviet Union was still in place, and it would be good to know which previously-hidden records on the Russian side have now become available. Until then, it's a great primer on a fascinating period of imperial history. ( )