With those books, however, the ambit was narrower, and his accounts focused on the detail of the missions. I had previously read, and enjoyed, his books on the derring-do of the members of the Secret Operations Executive during the Second World War. This, then, is the rich vein of history upon which Peter Hopkirk draws for his comprehensive history of British engagement in intelligence missions throughout Central Asia. The terrain was inhospitable in the extreme, but the lure of the hypothesised riches was stronger still. Names such as Bokhara, Samarkand, Trebizond and Khiva had already been romanticised as sources of exotic eastern splendour and came to feature regularly in military intelligence despatches. The lands in question were certainly worthy of colonial consideration. British diplomats were, consequently, relentless in their bids to make a succession of treaties with the rulers of neighbouring territories in a bid to establish a buffer zone between Russian-held areas and the borders of its own Empire. Britain was acutely aware of these expansionist ambitions, which were exacerbated by alliances between Russia and Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, which had the express aim of conquering and then sharing India. It also turns its attention towards British-occupied India to the south, seeking to expand through Afghanistan and surrounding lands.

Throughout the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, Russia expanded its already considerable sphere of influence at a vast rate, gradually annexing and then consolidating the largely barren tracts constituting Siberia to the east. Kipling did not coin the phrase, which was first employed by Captain Arthur Connolly, who was executed in Bokhara in 1842 at the order of the Emir, after having been captured on a spying mission. The eponymous young protagonist becomes a vital link in the intelligence network developed by the British administration in Northern India during the 1880s to monitor, and then thwart, threatened incursions into central Asia by the Russians.

The phrase ‘The Great Game’ has been immortalised through Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim.

The great game peter hopkirk review