THE BERLIN-BAGHDAD EXPRESS Sean McMeekin (Allen Lane, £25)

It was a politically powerful idea of the Germans to invade the Middle East through Islam at the time of the First World War. The key to it was The Berlin-Baghdad Express, a railway line pointing a poisoned arrow at the heart of the British Raj in India. McMeekin’s book is a colossal adventure, based on the building of a railway to Baghdad, with spies and agents abounding in the dream of Kaiser Wilhelm to crush British hegemony in the East with the co-operation of his Ottoman allies (“a match made in heaven”). An awe-inspiring epic, it echoed John Buchan’s spy thriller Greenmantle. “Let the Americans have the plains, the Russians Siberia, the French and Belgians and British various malaria-ridden lands in Africa. Germany would build her own economic empire in the very cradle of western civilisation,” writes McMeekin on the Kaiser’s vision. To achieve this would need a massive jihad, bearing in mind that even the British Empire hosted more Muslims than did the Ottoman archipelago.

Not only did the railway prove too challenging — it was not completed until 1940— but as the war took a fearful toll on the Western Front, the agents who should have set the deserts on fire were too inept, despite the formidable supply of weapons, their missions and expeditions sinking into mirage.

The romantic range of this book, from Egypt to Afghanistan, more than matches the Russian incursions in the Great Game.