Journey to Khiva - Hardcover

Glazebrook, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002726718 ISBN 13: 9780002726719

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1992

Synopsis

When Philip Glazebrook boarded the Moscow train at the Hook of Holland in May 1990 he was beginning a journey he had been waiting a life-time to make. His desire was to see the cities of Samarcand, Bokhara and Khiva, where some of the most dramatic innings of the "Great Game" - the war from 1830 to 1900 between Russia and England over control of the approaches to India - were played out. But to reach it he had to travel through the disintegrating Soviet Union, with its shortages, queues, muggers and ever-obstructive bureaucracy. Travelling in the company of the ghostly heroes and authors of earlier accounts, this book attempts to create an original travel book. Philip Glazebrook is the author of "The Gate at the End of the World" and "Journey to Kars".

About this title

From the Back Cover:

With a new Afterword covering events in Russian Central Asia since the collapse of the Communist régime.

'Journey to Khiva' is a book of travels among the remote cities and deserts of Russian Central Asia – Bokhara and Samarcand as well as Khiva and the River Oxus – where in the last century British and Russian imperialism clashed in the Great Game to win control of the approaches to northern India. Ruled over by medieval tyrants, this lawless arena attracted the knights errant of Victorian Britain and Russia (as well as one notable American) into a “tournament of shadows” which has long caught and held Philip Glazebrook’s imagination. As he set out on his travels into a Soviet Union on the point of disintegration, Glazebrook found that modern Russia has its extreme physical dangers too.

Shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 1992.

“A vivid and sometimes disturbing picture of the CIS in the moral void left by defeated authoritarianism ... interlaced with the history of the ‘Great Game’”
ROGER BRAY, 'Evening Standard'

“Glazebrook has the saving virtues of insight and human sympathy, and the trick of finding words that put you alongside him as he sees the shadows lengthening and the sun dipping behind a gilt cupola”
BRENDAN WALSH, 'Catholic Herald'

“Mr Glazebrook is one of those rarities, an armchair traveller who gets out of his armchair and visits the places which others merely dream about”
PEREGRINE HODGSON, 'Spectator'

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0002726718
• ISBN 13: 9780002726719
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288