Finished The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

>3.75/5

>The writing is good. The book focuses mainly on the stories of the British and Russian agents in central Asia. Not that much perspective from the natives. Covers the entire 19th century and ends with the British invasion of Tibet in 1904 and the Russo-Japanese War . Good if you want a history book that feels like a narrative but if you want an academic view of the period I would look elsewhere.

Now reading a book I bought very recently (rather than having it for ages before reading it) - Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924 by Charles Emmerson. Really enjoying it so far but it is an unusual style for a history book. Each chapter is a year with the subsections being seasons (winter 1917, summer 1919 etc). About 200 pages (out of 600 or so) and it is up to the winter of 1918-19. Jumps around a lot and covers the events as they happened, rather than covering something like the Russian Civil War all in one go. When I say it jumps around I mean it will be something like 'Russia - The Czechoslovak Legion falls out with the Bolsheviks' then 'Washington - Woodrow Wilson begins planning his outline for his peace plan and comes up with his 14 points' (obviously in full paragraphs and more detail than I did but that is the basic style, I think the Amazon storepage for it has a look inside if you want to see what I mean). Focuses a lot on famous people, Lenin, Hemmingway, Rosa Luxemburg etc.

Sidenote - Emmerson's 1913: The Year Before the Great War is very good if you are interested the culture/society/life of pre-WWI world without the focus on international relations.