It was a good book, and I’ll post a review of it later in a separate post. It was written pretty recently, about 15 years ago, by a British person in his early 60s, so it is neither from the times the events took place nor modern. It also is an appropriately neutral narrative, with no influence of modern events on the nature of the storytelling.

I enjoyed the Savage Frontier, although it is much more of a campaign history than is generally useful. The timing, as Curzon says, was ideal, but the second edition, which I read, was “updated” after America invaded Afghanistan. I don’t know how much. I thought parallels could be drawn when he was discussing, at the very end, Soviet pilots.

Much longer, but far more complete, is The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk. It covers 100 years of British and Russian involvement in the whole region, from Iran to the Aral Sea to Pakistan. For my money, a truth is that for 100 years hawks in Britain were saying Russia was going to invade India overland through Afghanistan. Did Russians ever dream up plans to do so? Sure. Did they ever come close? No. I have to wonder how possible it even was.

And then, after that, Grousset’s The Empires of the Steppes goes another 1000 years back, although the area of interest stretches all the way from Hungary to Korea.

By Jove, I am currently reading a book which also features Alexander Burnes! Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South Asia, 1757-1947, by Robert Johnson—which is excellent.