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Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of six books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Crimea: The Last Crusade   is Orlando Figes's new book.

Here some reviews of Crimea: The Last Crusade:
The Telegraph
The Observer
The Guardian
BBC History
The Economist
The Independent
Financial Times

Here you can find the Crimea interview.

The Crimean War dominated the mid nineteenth century, killed at least 800,000 men and pitted Russia against a formidable coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. It was a war for territory, provoked by fear that if the Ottoman Empire were to collapse then Russia could control a huge swathe of land from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. But it was also a war of religion, driven by a fervent, populist and ever more ferocious belief held by the Tsar Nicholas I that this was a crusade, the fulfilment of Russia's destiny to rule all Orthodox Christians and control the Holy Land. And it was a war based on hatreds and hypocrisy, specifically the overwhelming Russophobia that swept much of Europe.

There are many books in English on the Crimean War. But this is the first in any language to draw extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British sources to illuminate the geo-political, cultural and religious factors that shaped the involvement of each major power in the conflict. It also recreates the lived experience of the war, from the ordinary British soldier in his snow-filled trench to the haunted, gloomy figure of Tsar Nicholas himself, as he vows to take on the whole world in his hunt for religious salvation.

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