THE GREAT GAME BY PETER HOPKIRK
Reviewed in Slightly Foxed
Many years ago, when it was possible to do such things, I hitchhiked to India. I travelled through Iran and Afghanistan, saw the Great Buddhas at Bamiyan, and rode through the Khyber Pass on the roof of a brilliantly painted truck with my hair blowing in the wind. Later, as the world changed and carefree travel became more difficult, I came across Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game (1990) and was thrilled to read about the adventures of the first western travellers to those regions in the nineteenth century.
Of course, those travellers were more serious-minded than I was, and their travels were often a matter of life or death. The young men (they were invariably men) whose tales Hopkirk tells, mainly British and Russian, operated in Central Asia and up into the Pamirs as explorers, spies, mapmakers, soldiers, and often all four at once. Many wrote books which Hopkirk brilliantly synthesizes, describing their successes, scrapes and disasters, and he also dug deep into Foreign Office and other archives. It’s gripping, page-turning stuff, as colourfully written as fiction, with a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter. […]
From Of Captains and Khans, a book review published in Issue 74, Summer 2022.