JOURNEY TO KHIVA

PHILIP GLAZEBROOK

HARVILL PRESS
1992

First edition.
Philip Glazebrook's Journey to Kars, won praise on all sides: for the Observer, it was "quite the most original travel book for some time"; for the New Yorker., it was "not too much to suggest that no one has written a more satisfying, more enjoyable travel book in our time"; and for Paul Theroux it was that rare thing "a travel book [that] combines the personal and the scholarly with a good rough trip".

Journey to Khiva recounts Philip Glazebrook's experiences travelling 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 British India. Ruled 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.

Journey to Khiva is a book of travels in , search of the Turkestan of those dangerous days. But modern Russia too has its dangers, as Philip Glazebrook was to discover when he set out into a Soviet Union on the point of disintegration. His intention was to explore "the bumping pitch and the blinding light" of the Great Game, but his own experiences and his sketches of character and incident among his Uzbeg hosts convey a vivid impression of the present time in that unstable region.

22 x 14 cm. viii + 278 pp. Map endpapers.

Very good condition. Short closed tear to the dust jacket at the head of the spine. Spine slightly cocked.