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Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One
The forgotten story of British mavericks whose daring and fearless approach to impossible missions defied the odds and change the course of history.
We think we know the story of the First World War – a grim tale of brave soldiers led to slaughter on the Western Front, mere pawns in a brutal and senseless conflict. For countless honourable young men who served their country, this is tragically true. Yet beyond the familiar narratives lies a forgotten chapter of mavericks and misfits who defied the odds and carved their own paths through history.
In this page-turning account, Nick Higham introduces us to a small band of British soldiers, diplomats, spies and adventurers dispatched to the distant and chaotic shores of the Caspian Sea amidst the revolutions of 1917. While their contemporaries fought in the trenches, these men – enterprising, fearless and often reckless – embarked on a hastily devised to block the Turks and mitigate a murky struggle between the rising Bolsheviks and their enemies. At the tail end of the war, which spilled into the revolutionary era of the Russian Empire, these men masterfully navigated a complex theatre of war, where their life-or-death decisions had the potential to alter the course of history.
Drawing on personal diaries, memoirs and once-secret government archives, Mavericks brings to life a cast of eccentric heroes who survived against all odds to tell their extraordinary tales. This is a story of boldness and intrigue, set in a forgotten corner of 'the Great War' where the rules were made to be broken.
We think we know the story of the First World War – a grim tale of brave soldiers led to slaughter on the Western Front, mere pawns in a brutal and senseless conflict. For countless honourable young men who served their country, this is tragically true. Yet beyond the familiar narratives lies a forgotten chapter of mavericks and misfits who defied the odds and carved their own paths through history.
In this page-turning account, Nick Higham introduces us to a small band of British soldiers, diplomats, spies and adventurers dispatched to the distant and chaotic shores of the Caspian Sea amidst the revolutions of 1917. While their contemporaries fought in the trenches, these men – enterprising, fearless and often reckless – embarked on a hastily devised to block the Turks and mitigate a murky struggle between the rising Bolsheviks and their enemies. At the tail end of the war, which spilled into the revolutionary era of the Russian Empire, these men masterfully navigated a complex theatre of war, where their life-or-death decisions had the potential to alter the course of history.
Drawing on personal diaries, memoirs and once-secret government archives, Mavericks brings to life a cast of eccentric heroes who survived against all odds to tell their extraordinary tales. This is a story of boldness and intrigue, set in a forgotten corner of 'the Great War' where the rules were made to be broken.
- GenresHistoryWorld War I
336 pages, Hardcover
First published October 9, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 11, 2026
Muddled, impenetrable drivel.
I have no idea how this got published. A clue might be the encomiums on the cover from Nick Higham's BBC News colleagues - it seems to have been taken as read that a BBC journalist could write a passable book without anybody checking before publication that it was readable. In the case of Nick Higham, not on this evidence I fear.
The idea is promising - the "forgotten battle of WWI" of the subtitle is Baku 1918, which, like much of the war away from the Western Front, is almost totally neglected. Briefly, in 1917 the Russian Revolution and Lenin's withdrawal of Russia from the war threw Allied strategy into turmoil. The better-known threat was the release of Central Powers divisions to attempt a war-winning offensive on the Western Front in 1918. But there was also a crisis created on Russia's other front - in Asia against the Ottoman Empire. There appeared to be a possibility that Ottoman forces could overrun the oil-rich Caucasus, threaten Russia from the south, and even menace British India. In the event, this was illusory - the Ottoman armies were in hardly better fettle than the Russian, and the vast distances involved would have thwarted even Rommel and von Kleist's more mobile forces in 1942. But at the time, the threat seemed real, and Britain organised a scratch military force and a motley collection of spies, diplomats and eccentric adventurers to try to bolster resistance to the Ottomans by Tsarist Russian remnants and Caucasian separatist movements, with all sides being hampered by the new Soviet state and local Bolshevik sympathisers.
Nick Higham chooses to tell this story through the experiences of 5 (sometimes 6) British "mavericks" of the title, using their diaries and reports and later reminiscences as his source material. This leads to problem no.1 - as well as being "mavericks", the men left behind writings which are fragmentary and often inaccurate, and 5 of the 6 men were well-known for exaggeration, unreliable anecdotage, and frank invention. This would be fine in an attempted biography of the men, who do indeed seem to have had an interesting time, but this purports to be a work of history. So - tell what is reliably-known, then present the anecdotes and diaries, for what they are worth, as human stories and local colour. Instead we read long accounts of some dashing adventures concluded with the statement "x must have been mistaken about this because so-and-so event didn't happen until later". So why bloody tell us about it then ? This nonsense had happened several times by the time I reached page 100 and tossed this book aside.
Problem no.2 is Hick Higham's writing "style". Checking his biography, this man has a degree in English from Cambridge University, and he is a BBC journalist - his day job is to present complex stories in a way understandable to the less well-informed. So why can't he construct a coherent narrative ? Much of this book is reminiscent of Rowley Birkin QC in "The Fast Show" - a clearly drunk elderly man sitting by his fireside mumbling incoherently and occasionally producing a lucid but nonsensical phrase like "completely orf at the knee". The decision to present the mavericks' stories in separate chapters with little independent analysis or explanation means the book yo-yos backwards and forwards across time and space with no rhyme or reason. Again, this would be OK in a novelised memoir or a collection of short potted histories of the men's careers, but history, Mr Higham, is supposed to be chronological. The English is grammatical and literate, though there are irritating lapses into lazy youth idiom like "the Persian Empire, by the early 20th century, was a basket case". Leave it out, Nick, you're older than I am !
And, Kate Adie, if you found this book "Wildly exciting" you need to get out more. In spite of the stirring events depicted, it is as dull as dishwater.
A big raspberry from me.
I have no idea how this got published. A clue might be the encomiums on the cover from Nick Higham's BBC News colleagues - it seems to have been taken as read that a BBC journalist could write a passable book without anybody checking before publication that it was readable. In the case of Nick Higham, not on this evidence I fear.
The idea is promising - the "forgotten battle of WWI" of the subtitle is Baku 1918, which, like much of the war away from the Western Front, is almost totally neglected. Briefly, in 1917 the Russian Revolution and Lenin's withdrawal of Russia from the war threw Allied strategy into turmoil. The better-known threat was the release of Central Powers divisions to attempt a war-winning offensive on the Western Front in 1918. But there was also a crisis created on Russia's other front - in Asia against the Ottoman Empire. There appeared to be a possibility that Ottoman forces could overrun the oil-rich Caucasus, threaten Russia from the south, and even menace British India. In the event, this was illusory - the Ottoman armies were in hardly better fettle than the Russian, and the vast distances involved would have thwarted even Rommel and von Kleist's more mobile forces in 1942. But at the time, the threat seemed real, and Britain organised a scratch military force and a motley collection of spies, diplomats and eccentric adventurers to try to bolster resistance to the Ottomans by Tsarist Russian remnants and Caucasian separatist movements, with all sides being hampered by the new Soviet state and local Bolshevik sympathisers.
Nick Higham chooses to tell this story through the experiences of 5 (sometimes 6) British "mavericks" of the title, using their diaries and reports and later reminiscences as his source material. This leads to problem no.1 - as well as being "mavericks", the men left behind writings which are fragmentary and often inaccurate, and 5 of the 6 men were well-known for exaggeration, unreliable anecdotage, and frank invention. This would be fine in an attempted biography of the men, who do indeed seem to have had an interesting time, but this purports to be a work of history. So - tell what is reliably-known, then present the anecdotes and diaries, for what they are worth, as human stories and local colour. Instead we read long accounts of some dashing adventures concluded with the statement "x must have been mistaken about this because so-and-so event didn't happen until later". So why bloody tell us about it then ? This nonsense had happened several times by the time I reached page 100 and tossed this book aside.
Problem no.2 is Hick Higham's writing "style". Checking his biography, this man has a degree in English from Cambridge University, and he is a BBC journalist - his day job is to present complex stories in a way understandable to the less well-informed. So why can't he construct a coherent narrative ? Much of this book is reminiscent of Rowley Birkin QC in "The Fast Show" - a clearly drunk elderly man sitting by his fireside mumbling incoherently and occasionally producing a lucid but nonsensical phrase like "completely orf at the knee". The decision to present the mavericks' stories in separate chapters with little independent analysis or explanation means the book yo-yos backwards and forwards across time and space with no rhyme or reason. Again, this would be OK in a novelised memoir or a collection of short potted histories of the men's careers, but history, Mr Higham, is supposed to be chronological. The English is grammatical and literate, though there are irritating lapses into lazy youth idiom like "the Persian Empire, by the early 20th century, was a basket case". Leave it out, Nick, you're older than I am !
And, Kate Adie, if you found this book "Wildly exciting" you need to get out more. In spite of the stirring events depicted, it is as dull as dishwater.
A big raspberry from me.
November 28, 2025
Like all good tales of derring-do, this impressive book reads like a war story from the Boys Own Paper as it illuminates a forgotten corner of the world in the last days of the first World War, and the equally ambiguous, larger than life characters that inhabited it. Drawing from research into declassified official documents of Britain’s foreign services and Empire, and cross referencing these with the frequently more elaborate and contradictory memoirs of the protagonists, the author weaves a fantastic tale of heroism, battles, spying, double-crossing and subterfuge in Central Asia as British troops, Turkish troops, Russian troops and revolutionaries, Azeris and a host of others wrestled for control of the declining Ottoman Empire, and Baku and its oil wells in Azerbaijan. From the first descriptions of Lionel Dunsterville’s “Dunsterforce” of just 40-odd vans and cars and a force of less than 2,000 men we know that crossing Persia from Mesopotamia to reach the Caspian and defend Baku is going to be an almost insurmountable task – and that is before the other players in this Great Game are introduced: Ranald MacDonell, Edward Noel, Toby Rawlinson and Reginald Teague-Jones. This is a ripping yarn splendidly told of spies, aristocrats, smugglers, entrepreneurs and chancers, of can-do bravery and of a time which now seems sadly far away. Highly recommended.
January 4, 2026
4/5
It's about 1918 in Central Asia and the Caucasus. It's 1918, the Russian Revolution has just happened, and the Russian army is collapsing. Britain is worried that the Ottomans (and therefore the Germans) will be able to seize Baku (in modern day Azerbaijan) and its oil supply for their war effort, and the book follows the British attempts to prevent this.
The book is very biographical and story-like in style, focusing on 5 British men (a general, Lionel Dunsterville and his small army, as well as 4 other spies and diplomats) and their adventures in the Caucasus (and later Turkmenistan) trying to beat the Turks and the Bolsheviks.
Overall I thought the book was pretty good but I'm only giving it 4/5 because I felt it was a bit too biographical and I wanted more big picture stuff and analysis.
It's about 1918 in Central Asia and the Caucasus. It's 1918, the Russian Revolution has just happened, and the Russian army is collapsing. Britain is worried that the Ottomans (and therefore the Germans) will be able to seize Baku (in modern day Azerbaijan) and its oil supply for their war effort, and the book follows the British attempts to prevent this.
The book is very biographical and story-like in style, focusing on 5 British men (a general, Lionel Dunsterville and his small army, as well as 4 other spies and diplomats) and their adventures in the Caucasus (and later Turkmenistan) trying to beat the Turks and the Bolsheviks.
Overall I thought the book was pretty good but I'm only giving it 4/5 because I felt it was a bit too biographical and I wanted more big picture stuff and analysis.
April 1, 2026
Struggled with this one, as interesting as I found the information delivered showing the disconnect between actions and reports of the actions, and the way that this impacted and the economy of all involved I also found the delivery to be extremely dry and somewhat impenetrable at times.
As I result it's not something I can recommend unless you are hugely into this kind of thing
As I result it's not something I can recommend unless you are hugely into this kind of thing
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews