SOURCE: Murphy, Dervla. “Not Only the Past, Brittle with Relics.” Spectator 273, no. 8672 (24 September 1994): 44.

In the following review, Murphy praises Thubron's insight and attention to detail in The Lost Heart of Asia.

Yes, they said, they were Yagnobski. They all spoke Sogdian in the home, young and old, and had inherited the language from their parents, by ear … I listened almost in disbelief. This, I told myself, was the last, distorted echo of the battle-cries shouted 2500 years ago by the armies of the Great Kings at Marathon and Thermopylae, all that remained from the chant of Zoroastrian priests or the pleas of Persian satraps to Alexander the Great. Yet it was spoken by impoverished goatherds in the Pamirs.

Colin Thubron's search for those goatherds took him through the north-west Pamir on tracks that climbed to 11,000 feet and caused his friend Oman's battered Lada to ‘buck like a stallion’ and...