Play up, play up.....

....and play the game.
The first picture illustrates the game of Cricket.
Cricket. A game invented as a light relief from the real importance of real life in the real world.
A means of relaxing. In spare time.

But the British went a bit silly, a bit soft in the head.
They started to pretend that real life itself was some sort of a game.
The real people smiled and humoured this nonsense of the popular culture and happily went on changing the world.
Men like Sidney Reilly
were willingly recruited to the success story that was Great Britain; while the best of British was expanding horizons, the stay-at-home heroes were taking charge.
The game's the thing. Politicians played 'the Great Game'.
With lives, usually.
Reilly was there to act as their agent; the man from Brazil, the illegitimate Russian jew with half a dozen spoken languages and half a dozen physical ones, he was recognised and rewarded as a uniquely capable man who made his work look like a game.
But look at his face.
Do you see him trading tennis balls at a Vicarage match?
No.
The game mentality was running riot in the minds of the British, drunk as they were with the success of their best people.
So much so that it was thought to be enough just to be British.
This
is General 'Chinese' Gordon, who was sent to Khartoum by a bunch of optimists to prevent the Mad Mahdi's uprising.
He was killed. By Islamic Fundamentalists.
It took years, an army, and another general, Kitchener, to destroy the rebellion and return the Sudan to relative peace.
But it was an indication of the future, in which culpable fools are allowed to make up conformal society and dispose of able men(like Gordon and Reilly) even to the point of sending them on suicide missions.
(Reilly finally voluntarily went on a suicide mission in the Soviet Union, to expose a mendacious policy of Stalin).