Journey to Khiva, none more so than his telling of a narrow escape from a knife-bearing ne’er-do-well in a Moscow hotel bedroom. Glazebrook was en route to ‘Russia’s Central Asia’ – playground of the Great Game – in, I surmise, the late 1980s. Memories of my own mid-1970s time in that city also bear a few disturbing events, but no one as far I was aware seemed bent on cutting my throat. I was there in the month of March when most of the winter’s snow had thawed and refrozen several times, and wore a mantle of sooty smuts that turned the place greyer than I supposed it to be. I did see a few gardens, but had to apply powerful imagination to envisage the bouquets of fragrant roses that are said to bloom during the country’s short summer. Overriding among my recollections is a train journey to Leningrad (as...
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