Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia [Paperback]

In 1800 the frontier bases of the British and Russian empires were 2,000 miles apart; by 1900 the gap had diminished to a few hundred miles. Such was the nature of the struggle, or the "Great Game" as it became known, for mastery of Central Asia between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia. The very name the "Great Game" has romantic echoes and Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac's fascinating and readable account is peopled with long-forgotten adventurers and explorers who have left more than conquest to the generations that follow. There's the Russian Nikolai Przhevalsky who left his name to scores of flora and fauna, including the ancestor to the horse; not to mention the scores of plucky cartographic Brits who solved most of the riddles of Asia's geography. But behind the romance lies a darker more serious purpose. Although the Russians and the British never actually went to war over Asia, they fought a propaganda war, both at home and abroad, that has echoes of the Cold War. And as in the Cold War, there were scores of innocent victims. To protect its right--and it was seen as a right--to Empire, and India in particular, Britain brought about two wars in Afghanistan, invaded Tibet, took over Egypt and divided Persia into different spheres of influence. All this Meyer and Brysac recount with a loving, unfussy attention to detail but where they come into their own is in bringing the story up to date. For the Great Game continues, even though Britain has been replaced by the US. Throughout the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s the Americans were happy to fund anti-democratic guerrilla groups on the grounds they were more opposed to the Soviets than they were to the US. Ever since the Soviets withdrew, the American influence has lingered as dozens of well-armed rival factions continue to tear their country apart. As before, the Great Game is anything but a game for those directly involved. For them it is a matter of life and death. --John Crace --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Monumental . . . A remarkable achievement' Jan Morris, OBSERVER 'Scrupulously balanced and extremely readable . . . It is overview with nobs on' Geoffrey Moorhouse, GUARDIAN 'Terrific . . . Although this book is a big one, its pages race away' Nigel Jones, SUNDAY EXPRESS 'Entertaining, fluent and absorbing' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'In their well-written and fair-minded book, Meyer and Brysac let their characters tell the story of the Game, leaving readers with a powerful sense of what it was like to be a participant. The sheer sweep of the contest, its imperial scale and its exhileration are admirably conveyed.' David Gilmour 'In TOURNAMENT OF SHADOWS not only so the literary and historical styles come into an excellent novelistic concert but the events themselves are borne back to us from the past and into the light of our common and contemporary day. Chechnya, Daghestan, Serbia, Palestine, Cyprus, Tibet, Afghanistan, Kashmir: I felt I had a better grasp of them all when I finished reading this enthralling book.' Christopher Hitchens 'The Meyers have written a stimulating book that captures the excitement of the efforts to understand and gain mastery over Central Asia.' LITERARY REVIEW 'Their enthusiasm for the characters and the subject shines through.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Readable and entertaining.' THE SPECTATOR 'Engrossing.' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

'Scrupulously balanced and extremely readable . . . It is overview with nobs on'

'Terrific . . . Although this book is a big one, its pages race away'

'Entertaining, fluent and absorbing'

The original Great Game (1800-1917), 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. The prize, control of the vast Eurasian heartland, was believed by some to be the key to world domination. Teeming with improbable drama and exaggerated tensions, the conflict featured soldiers, mystics and spies, among them some of history's most colourful and romantic characters. While the original Great Game ended with the Russian Revolution, the geopolitical wrangles for territory and power have continued into the late twentieth century - culminating in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac's magisterial one-volume survey chronicles nearly two centuries of conflict in vivid and compelling fashion.

Karl E. Meyer is a former London bureau chief for the WASHINGTON POST. His wife, Shareen Blair Brysac, is a prize-winning documentary-maker for CBS News.

The View from the Khyber This book had its inception on a sunny December morning in 1990 when my wife Shareen and I found ourselves on the far side of the Khyber Pass gazing down at Afghanistan. We were accompanied by a wizened Pathan soldier, armed with what looked like a nineteenth-century musket, and by a somewhat bored official chaperon assigned to us by the Foreign Ministry of Pakistan. We were not bored. Our car had threaded through a great outdoor museum of empire and conquest. Stamped in abutting cliffs were the emblems and memorials of long-departed British regiments, scores of them. We came upon a concrete guardhouse, with vertical gunslits, only yards from a tablet stating that we were at the doorway to the Indian subcontinent. At intervals, we glimpsed the Khyber Railway, with its ninety-two bridges and thirty-four tunnels over a twenty-five-mile route. This engineering marvel, completed by the British in the 1920s, was prompted by security fears stemming from incessant uprisings on India's North-West Frontier. The rails flanked a far more ancient highway through the Khyber, completed in the sixteenth century by Mughal engineers, and later a principal link in the Grand Trunk Road from Kabul to Delhi. Mughal workmen doubtless came upon Greek coins dating from the conquests of Alexander, examples of which are still to be found in the bazaars of Landi Kotal, the last town on the Pakistan side of the frontier and still garrisoned, as it was a century ago, by the Khyber Rifles.

From a promontory near Landi Kotal, Shareen and I could make out trucks and cars inching toward Jalalabad, the nearest big city in Afghanistan. We were looking here not at a museum display but at a country whose sorrows belied the peaceful morning mist below us. By 1990, the last Soviet soldier had already returned home, ending a nine-year invasion and occupation that claimed a million lives and displaced a third of the population. But the Soviet withdrawal did not end the devastation. Instead, the conflict deepened as a dozen factions, each aided and armed by outside patrons, tore each other and their country apart. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.