Caucasian Battlefields. A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border 1828-1921.

Cambridge: at the University Press,, 1953. First edition, first impression, particularly scare in the jacket. The work of the extraordinary scion of a theatrical family and a brilliant Russian emigré, this was described on publication as "the most complete and authoritative study of this subject available in the English language" (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, p. 206), and has recently been confirmed as "a classic study" (ODNB). Allen "was a man of many talents: a gentleman, a businessman, a philosopher, an adventurer, but continuously and most powerfully an energetic historian and linguist. He made his library, later held by the University of Indiana, the finest private collection of books on Georgia and the Caucasus in the Western world. Throughout his life he travelled extensively in remote places and may be the only person to have walked the entire length of the Turkish-Russian frontier" (ibid.). An essayist, cultural historian, novelist and playwright, Muratoff was cited in Clive James's Cultural Amnesia as a prime example of "just how brilliant somebody can be and still be a forgotten man", having published an account of a tour of Italy, Obrazy italii (1911-24), "one of the most dazzling books of its type ever written. As a book on the Italian Grand Tour it not only stands directly in the tradition of Goethe, Gregorovius, Burckhardt and Arthur Symons, but it is better than any of them" (James, p. 524). Octavo. Half-tone frontispiece and 7 plates, 8 folding maps, 17 full-page maps, and 14 sketch maps to the text. Original blue buckram, title gilt to spine. With dust jacket. Binding just a little shaken, spine sunned; spine and panels of price-clipped jacket toned, strengthened on verso with opaque tape top and bottom, and paper at head of spine and rear flap, small stain to back panel: a very good copy in a good jacket. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, XIX, 1, February 1957; Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, 2007.