A nasty old person from Persia

I have to register a strong complaint about the misleading and opportunistic title of this book; it is not about ‘the Great Game’ as the phrase is usually understood. Various interesting and valuable attempts, such as the studies by Peter Hopkirk, have made the case that the British/Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia not only continued into the Soviet era, but is plausibly still going on. But no one will expect a book with this title to be about 20th-century Iran. Nor is it as general as the title implies; I would love to read a dashing book which deserves this title. There are excellent English books on Persia and the Great Game, pre-eminently M. E. Yapp’s brilliant Strategies of British India, but they are all a bit magisterial. Anyway, this is not what it pretends to be, but merely a biography of one British operator. On its own terms, it is quite fun, but it does seem a bit like calling a life of Lucy de la Tour du Pin The French Revolution.

The interesting thing is that a book like this is being published at all. Until very recently, the lives of men like Percy Sykes were universally regarded as beyond a joke. The reminiscences of old empire hands, whether produced over dinner in Cheltenham or in small editions by forbearing publishers, have long been a byword for tedium and absurdity. Tales of pig-sticking, shikars and what the Nazir said to the District Collector about the memsahib’s shooting-stick in 1923 have for 40 years only served as the subject for mockery. It’s not quite fair. Certainly any second-hand bookshop could produce shelf-fuls of imperial memoirs, most of which are tedious accounts of interesting lives, interspersed with the sort of bizarre rants which retirement sometimes produces. But they were interesting lives, and a surprising number of such reminiscences turn out to be better than their invariably ludicrous titles might lead you to expect (one of the most enjoyable is Colin Mackenzie’s Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier’s Life, which sounds beyond parody).