'A vivid reminder of the extraordinary lives and times of those who once played the Great Game. Percy Sykes was one of the ablest, if most controversial, of these. A valuable addition to Great Game literature.' Peter Hopkirk 'A superbly researched and engaginly written biography. Sykes was a character whose exploits even John Buchan would have feared to invent.' Antony Beevor 'Antony Wynn has produced a well-researched and highly readable life of a character who, in his own day, astonished his contemporaries by his courage and his cheek.' John Ure - Times Literary Supplement 'Wynn's writing is clear and vigorous; he wields no ideological agenda - unless an underlying sympathy for Persians counts as such. ... an enjoyable and compelling account of a fascinating life.' Noel Malcolm - Sunday Telegraph 'Where Wynn excels is in his sense of place. He is very good at conjuring up the look of Kerman, Meshed and the Persian landscape. One also gets a strong sense of what it was like for servants of the Raj on the move, with their rubber baths, tent valises, tins of stewed fruit and jars of Bovril, also of their more exotic retinue of farrashes, syces and pish-khedmats.' Robert Irwin - Literary Review 'A well-researched, hard-nosed, and engaging biography.' Financial Times 'Antony Wynn's book is full of marvellous, half-believable tales of bluff and daring.' Sunday Telegraph Percy Sykes began his career with Army Intelligence in India. Their main concern was the threat to India of the Russian advances across Central Asia. In 1893 they sent Sykes into eastern Persia on the first of many expeditions. Always with his terrier and often with his sister or his wife, he rode over thousands of miles of unknown desert, marsh and mountain to map them and establish his network of informants, helped by a Persian prince whom he had met in the desert. Later, as consul in Meshed, Sykes used his wits to foil Russian attempts to take over northern Persia, the key to India. But when the First World War broke out it was Wassmuss - 'the German Lawrence' - who proved the greatest threat to Britain, as Sykes was sent alone to raise an army to defeat him. In the great Victorian tradition, the soldier-diplomat Sykes hunted gazelle with princes, studied Persian poetry, and sat at the feet of dervish masters. This study of Sykes' secret despatches over twenty-five turbulent years gives an unusual insight into the inner workings of Persia, which are little changed in the Iran of today.

The Great Game sheds new light on Asia’s political influence on Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL The Great Game, 1856–1907 presents a new view of the British-Russian competition for dominance in Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Evgeny Sergeev offers a complex and novel point of view by synthesizing official collections of documents, parliamentary papers, political pamphlets, memoirs, contemporary journalism, and guidebooks from unpublished and less studied primary sources in Russian, British, Indian, Georgian, Uzbek, and Turkmen archives. His efforts amplify our knowledge of Russia by considering the important influences of local Asian powers. Ultimately, this book disputes the characterization of the Great Game as a proto–Cold War between East and West. By relating it to other regional actors, Sergeev creates a more accurate view of the game’s impact on later wars and on the shape of post–World War I Asia.

From the romantic conflicts of the Victorian Great Game to the war-torn history of the region in recent decades, Tournament of Shadows traces the struggle for control of Central Asia and Tibet from the 1830s to the present. The original Great Game, the clandestine struggle between Russia and Britain for mastery of Central Asia, has long been regarded as one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts in history. Many believed that control of the vast Eurasian heartland was the key to world dominion. The original Great Game ended with the Russian Revolution, but the geopolitical struggles in Central Asia continue to the present day. In this updated edition, the authors reflect on Central Asia's history since the end of the Russo-Afghan war, and particularly in the wake of 9/11.

In the tradition of The Prize, a contemporary look at the history, passion, and politics of oil and gas resources, and the struggle to control them. Using the concept of the “Great Game” that Rudyard Kipling immortalized in his novel Kim, Kleveman argues that there is now a new Great Game in the region, a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Tsarist Russia. Traveling thousands of miles, from Turkmenistan (where statues of the country’s leader are made of gold and line the thoroughfares) to the Afghan Hindu Kush, Kleveman met with the principal Great Game actors between Kabul and Moscow: oil barons, generals, diplomats, and warlords. Based on extensive research and travel in the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia, The New Great Game is a thrilling travel narrative through one of the world’s last unexplored frontiers, and a savvy and incisive analysis of the power struggle for the world’s remaining energy resources. “[Kleveman] can take credit for a book that is essential for those seeking as many views as possible on this complicated moment in history.” —The Seattle Times

"A history of the relationship between Iran and America from the 1700s through the current day"--