On Secret Service East of Constantinople

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1848546335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Under the banner of a Holy War, masterminded in Berlin and unleashed from Constantinople, the Germans and the Turks set out in 1914 to foment violent revolutionary uprisings against the British in India and the Russians in Central Asia. It was a new and more sinister version of the old Great Game, with world domination as its ultimate aim. Here, told in epic detail and for the first time, is the true story behind John Buchan's classic wartime thriller Greenmantle, recounted through the adventures and misadventures of the secret agents and others who took part in it. It is an ominously topical tale today in view of the continuing turmoil in this volatile region where the Great Game has never really ceased.

Like Hidden Fire

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: Kodansha
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
A GRIPPING STORY OF IMPERIAL AMBITION, SWASHBUCKLING ADVENTURE, AND THE KAISER'S OWN JIHAD. An acclaimed historian tells, for the first time, the full story of the conspiracy between the Germans and the Turks to unleash a Muslim holy war against the British in India and the Russians in the Caucasus. Drawing on recently opened intelligence files and rare personal accounts, Peter Hopkirkskillfully reconstructs the Kaiser's bold plan and describes the exploits of the secret agents on both sides-disguised variously as archaeologists, traders, and circus performers-as they sought to foment or foil the uprising and determine the outcome of World War I.

Setting the East Ablaze

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1848547250
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
'Let us turn our faces towards Asia', exhorted Lenin when the long-awaited revolution in Europe failed to materialize. 'The East will help us conquer the West.' Peter Hopkirk's book tells for the first time the story of the Bolshevik attempt to set the East ablaze with the heady new gospel of Marxism. Lenin's dream was to liberate the whole of Asia, but his starting point was British India. A shadowy undeclared war followed. Among the players in this new Great Game were British spies, Communist revolutionaries, Muslim visionaries and Chinese warlords - as well as a White Russian baron who roasted his Bolshevik captives alive. Here is an extraordinary tale of intrigue and treachery, barbarism and civil war, whose violent repercussions continue to be felt in Central Asia today.

Quest for Kim

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1848547277
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here retraces Kim's footsteps across Kipling's India to see how much of it remains. To attempt this with a fictional hero would normally be pointless. But Kim is different. For much of this Great Game classic was inspired by actual people and places, thus blurring the line between the real and the imaginary. Less a travel book than a literary detective story, this is the intriguing story of Peter Hopkirk's quest for Kim and a host of other shadowy figures.

Setting the East Ablaze

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192851666
Category : Asia, Central
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
As the European revolution failed to materialize, Lenin decreed, Let us turn our faces towards Asia. The East will help us to conquer the West.'

Eastern Approaches

Author: Fitzroy MaClean
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241973252
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
Fitztroy Maclean was one of the real-life inspirations for super-spy James Bond. After adventures in Soviet Russia before the war, Maclean fought with the SAS in North Africa in 1942. There he specialised in hair-raising commando raids behind enemy lines, including the daring and outrageous kidnapping of the German Consul in Axis-controlled Iraq. Maclean's extraordinary adventures in the Western Desert and later fighting alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia are blistering reading and show what it took to be a British hero who broke the mould . . .

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192802118
Category : Archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it travelled precious cargoes of silk, gold, and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centres of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left, and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years. But legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasurees and guarded by demons. In the early years of the 20th century, foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures, and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.

Trespassers on the Roof of the World

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1848547269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
No other land has captured man's imagination quite like Tibet. Hidden away behind the highest mountains on earth, and ruled over by a mysterious God-king, it was for centuries a land forbidden to all outsiders. In this remarkable and ultimately tragic narrative, Peter Hopkirk recounts the forcible opening up of this medieval Buddhist kingdom by inquisitive Western travellers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the race to reach Lhasa, Tibet's sacred capital. This epic, often harrowing tale, which ends with the Chinese invasion of 1950, draws on a colourful cast of gatecrashers from nine different countries. Among them were adventurous young officers on Great Game missions, explorers and mountaineers, mystics and missionaries. All took their lives in their hands, including three intrepid women. Some were never to return.

A Time of Gifts

Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175174
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.

Agent of Byzantium

Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504009444
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
From the New York Times–bestselling “standard-bearer for alternate history”: A spy takes on the enemies of the Byzantine Empire (USA Today). In another, very different timeline—one in which Mohammed embraced Christianity and Islam never came to be—the Byzantine Empire still flourishes in the fourteenth century, and wondrous technologies are emerging earlier than they did in our own. Having lost his family to the ravages of smallpox, Basil Argyros has decided to dedicate his life to Byzantium. A stalwart soldier and able secret agent, Basil serves his emperor courageously, going undercover to unearth Persia’s dastardly plots and disrupting the dark machinations of his beautiful archenemy, the Persian spy Mirrane, while defusing dire threats emerging from the Western realm of the Franco-Saxons. But the world Basil so staunchly defends is changing rapidly, and he must remain ever vigilant, for in this great game of empires, the player who controls the most advanced tools and weaponry—tools like gunpowder, printing, vaccines, and telescopes—must certainly emerge victorious. A collection of interlocking stories that showcase the courage, ingenuity, and breathtaking derring-do of superspy Basil Argyros, Agent of Byzantium presents the great Harry Turtledove at his alternate-world-building best. At once intricate, exciting, witty, and wildly inventive, this is a many-faceted gem from a master of the genre.