On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire
By (Author) Peter Hopkirk
John Murray Press
John Murray Publishers Ltd
11th May 2006
27th March 2006
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
First World War
Revolutionary groups and movements
Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions
940.485
Paperback
448
Width 134mm, Height 197mm, Spine 29mm
327g
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.'Recreates with much verve and brilliance, the clandestine attempts by Britain's imperial rivals to subvert the British Empire in India' -- Guardian 'Tells with great fluency, authority and narrative skill ... a story which no single book has told before' -- Sunday Telegraph
Peter Hopkirk has travelled widely in the regions where his six books are set - Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, India and Pakistan, Iran, and Eastern Turkey. He has worked as an ITN reporter, the New York correspondent of the old Daily Express, and - for twenty years - on The Times. No stranger to misadventure, he has twice been held in secret police cells and has also been hijacked by Arab terrorists. His works have been translated into fourteen languages.