SOURCE: "The Byronic East," in The London Mercury, Vol. XXXVI, No. 212, June, 1937, pp. 195-96.

In the following review of The Road to Oxiana, Greene discusses what he considers the book's strengths and shortcomings.

"Samarcand, for the last fifty years, has attracted scholars, painters, and photographers. Thus the setting of the Timurid Renaissance is conceived as Samarcand and Transoxiana, while its proper capital, Herat, remains but a name and a ghost. Now the position is reversed. The Russians have closed Turkistan. The Afghans have opened their country. And the opportunity arrives to redress the balance. Strolling up the road towards the minarets, I feel as one might feel who has lighted on the lost books of Livy or an unknown Botticelli."

It is this mixture of scholarship and romanticism that gives Mr. Byron's account of a journey through Persia and Afghanistan [The Road to Oxiana] its unusual and agreeable...