Peter Hopkirk

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Peter Hopkirk (born December 15, 1930) is a British journalist and author who has written six books about the British Empire and Central Asia.

Biography

Hopkirk has travelled widely over many years in the regions where his six books are set – Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Eastern Turkey.

Before turning full-time author he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York correspondent of Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, and then worked for nearly twenty years on The Times; five as its chief reporter, and latterly as a Middle East and Far East specialist. In the 1950s he edited the West African news magazine Drum, sister paper to its legendary South African namesake. Before entering Fleet Street he served as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles — in the same battalion as Lance-Corporal Idi Amin, later to emerge as the Ugandan tyrant.

No stranger to misadventure, Hopkirk has twice been held in secret-police cells — in Cuba and the Middle East – and has also been hijacked by Arab terrorists. His works have been translated – officially - into fourteen languages, and unofficial versions in local languages are apt to appear in the bazaars of Central Asia. In 1999 he was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal for his writing and travels by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.

Hopkirk attended the Dragon School in Oxford.

His wife Kathleen also published The Traveller’s Companion to Central Asia in 1994.

Bibliography

• Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia, 1980
  • on early European explorations of the Taklamakan Desert
• Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet, 1982
• Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia, 1984
• The Great Game: the Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, 1990
• On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Great Game and the Great War, 1994
  • published in the US as: Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, 1995
  • on plots by the Germans to raise Central Asia against the British during World War One
• Quest for Kim: in Search of Kipling’s Great Game, 1996;
  • a travelogue to the locations of Kipling's novel Kim

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