Michael Strogoff

The tsar's courier carries a message to Irkutsk through a Tartar rising, with a false brother on the road, a journalist on each flank, and the certainty that if he is recognised he will not arrive. Verne's publisher Hetzel had the manuscript read by Turgenev, so that nothing in it would give offence in St Petersburg. The scene of the sabre and the eyes is among the cruellest things in nineteenth-century adventure. Twenty plates of nineteenth-century battle painting by Adolf Schreyer and Bogdan Willewalde, from Saragossa to the Spicherer Berg, give the courier's ride its smoke and cavalry.