Prisoners of Geography was a Christmas gift from my boyfriend and not the usual type of book I would pick up. I did not realise that it was initially a book about geopolitics and how the landscape can impact on foreign relations, national politics and agendas.

The strengths of this book are that Tim Marshall offers an accessible introduction to geopolitics as a concept. He splits his book into regions focusing on Russia, China, USA, Western Europe, Latin America, Korea and Japan, the Middle East and Antarctica. He writes in an accessible and interesting way and I flicked through the whole book in a couple of days.

However, I think what is quite evident is that Tim Marshall is a journalist first and foremost. The writing style and opinion elements are clearly traits of his journalism roots and I think this book is very surface level. He skirts over historical events and I think even some of his geopolitical arguments are not always conclusive or entirely convincing. He also does not footnote any of his work, which is becoming a pet-hate of mine in non-fiction, and this always leaves me sceptical about which arguments are sourced and which are opinion driven.

Overall, I think Prisoners of Geography is a great introduction to some important world-political arguments. It raises important questions about Chinese power and influence, Russian intelligence, US plans and legacies of colonialism. However, Marshall attempts to cover a lot of countries and history and for that reason this can only ever be a surface-level introduction. I definitely learnt things from reading this book, and would be curious to read more on the topic of geopolitics for sure after reading this.