The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

"El gran juego" es una obra fantástica donde se nos transporta a las remotas tierras del Asia central y se nos explica, con un detalle y una capacidad narrativa sobresaliente, el juego expansivo y colonial que llevaron acabo Rusia y Gran Bretaña desde finales del siglo XVII hasta los albores del siglo XX para conquistar unos y salvaguardar otros la auténtica joya de la corona del imperio británico: la India. Una lectura indispensable para quién quiera entender el pasado y el presente de esa convulsa zona.

As would be expected of Peter Hopkirk, this book is well researched and well written. It reads like a continuous story and therefore keeps the reader engaged and it flows well from beginning to end. It is a period of history that I have grown interested in and, having read other material on the subject, I would say that Peter Hopkirk's version is superior.It's amazing the adventures of the brave explorers that went before us. We really are a soft lot now with our expectations of warmth and comfort in our homes, easy transport in cars and planes and instant communication through phones and email. The hardships some of these characters had to endure we could not begin to understand.This is not only an adventure story, it is also an important part of British history and one that many are possibly unaware of. In some ways this followed on with the cold war, although the theatre may have moved a little. This story also helps to put certain aspects of history into context and to help the understanding of the situation at the time - not least the dynamic between the british government in India and the british Government in England.

Se non si è a conoscenza dei fatti narrati in questo testo di storia, non si può capire quello che la Russia sta tentando di fare attualmente

The Great Game tells the story of Anglo-Russian struggles for hegemony in Central Asia, the Russians trying to expand their empire (until finally defeated by the Japanese in 1905) and the British attempting to protect the crown jewel of their empire, India, from Russian empirial aspirations.The story is being told following crucial events in the lives and adventures of British, Russian and Indian officers making it a vivid narrative and very hard for the reader putting the book down for a moment

"There were peaches, plums, apricots, pears, apples, quinces, cherries, walnuts, mulberries pomegranates and vines all growing in one garden. There were also nightingales, blackbirds, thrushes and doves ... and chattering magpies on almost every tree." Thus Alexander Burnes, a young British subaltern, likening the city he had entered for the first time to paradise. The date was April 1832. The city was Kabul.Peter Hopkirk's masterly history goes a long way to explaining how the capital of Afghanistan and its surroundings have been transformed into the bloody battleground which features so often in today's television news. The story covers most of the 19th Century, when Russia was flexing its muscles to extend its eastern boundaries while India - at the outset run by a commercial enterprise, the East India Company, with its own army - feared an invasion from the north. Persia and Turkey had their own interests to protect and possibly to advance. Between the territories of the great powers lay a virtually unmapped, mountainous region populated by warring khanates.Here are the men who shaped the conflict, sometimes in disguise, always in danger, often wielding swords and bayonets. They were principally British and Russian with a supporting cast of Cossacks, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Afghans, Turcomans and Kashmiris. Treachery, bluff and double bluff were the cards in the Great Game. Sieges and battles, vividly described, make for enthralling reading; heroes emerge whose deeds earned many a Victoria Cross. There were occasions when officers from the two sides could share a meal on a mountainside and drink a toast to the possibility that their next meeting might be as deadly enemies. By the end the dead numbered not tens but hundreds of thousands.Not the least achievement of this fine book is to present much of the struggle in terms of the brave men from both sides who took leading roles, but also to preserve a clear view of the fluctuating political and diplomatic exchanges between London, Calcutta and Simla, and St Petersburg. Successive Tsars come and go, the British Parliament is itself a battleground between Tories and Liberals.There are lessons here in abundance, not least to leave one dismayed by what has become of Kabul between 1832 and 2009.