That colossal wreck

There is a delightful tradition among the English of writing guide books to inaccessible parts of the world. Nowhere has inspired us more than South and Central Asia, seat of the Raj and the theatre that staged the Great Game.

Contrary to what one might suppose, it is not a tradition that died with the last King-Emperor. Among the most useful in the genre is, for instance, A Traveller’s Guide to Pakistan, published in 1981 and compiled by Hilary Adams and Isobel Shaw, two diplomatic wives who thus rendered at least as great service as their husbands. Their efforts would have been justified by one entry alone. They record that one of the gravestones in the Christian cemetery on the Jamrud Road in Peshawar reads, ‘Here lies Captain Ernest Bloomfield/ Accidentally shot by his orderly/ March 2nd 1879./ Well done, good and faithful servant.’

Bijan Omrani and Matthew Leeming are mostly above such frivolity.