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HISTORY: MARY RUSSELLreviews Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the CaucasusBy Oliver Bullough Allen Lane, 496pp, £25

‘THE RISING SUN had burned off the fog and, as we topped the long ridge, the mountains suddenly loomed up to the left of us, impossibly grand in the pink light of the morning. There was Kazbek, with its sloped shoulders like a monk in white . . . And that solid loom on the horizon was Elbrus, the double-headed giant of the central Caucasus, emblem of the land of the mountain Turks.”