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.