Tournament Of Shadows

Karl E Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac

Editions

Review

This handsome volume came out in the USA in 1999 and for some reason went completely unnoticed in the UK.  We picked up on it because of an exceptionally good review in the Financial Times in Jan 2000.  Like Peter Hopkirk’s superb The Great Game pbk £9.99, it deals with the struggle for control of Central Asia between Russia and Britain in the nineteenth century and beyond, a sort of cold war which is packed with glorious characters and crazy stories.  We are in the territory of Kipling’s Kim, or Flashman during the Afghan Wars.

The perspective of this book differs from Hopkirk’s because the authors are as interested in the Russian (and Tibetan, Chinese and American) aspects as the British.  And what fires their imagination is the people in the field – the pundits and the princes, the mystics and the madcaps – rather than the mandarins in Whitehall and St Petersburg.  Besides being richly entertaining, it is a clear analysis of a complex, murky area of history. - review by Johnny de Falbe

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