Philip Glazebrook
Life with a Star by Jiri Weil (Collins, £12.95). This pitiless account of a Prague Jew's life under the Nazis chills the read- er's heart. It is not that the horrors are laid on thick. But a hopeless sense of emptiness creeps from the narrator into the book, and from there into the reader's mind like despair. He takes to its limit the doctrine of non-attachment as a means of survival: 'I'm not going to bother about anything [he says], I'm not going to prepare any luggage because you never know if they'll let you keep it.' So he strips himself of every attachment to objects or to people, exting- uishing even his identity, in order to fit through the needle's eye of 'the transports' when they come, as they will, to take him to the death-camp.
The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray, £19.95). This is a comprehensive account of an interesting historical inter- lude, the 19th-century contest belween Russia and England for influence in the Central Asian Khanates with romantic names (Bokhara, Khiva, Samarkand) which guarded the approach to British India. The narrative is never dull, and the book serves the additional purpose of pointing a reader in the direction of the many fascinating and lively accounts of travels and adventures in Turkestan writ- ten by the players of 'the great game' themselves, extraordinary men dealing with fast bowling on bad pitches.
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