Around 1850, the northern European, liberal, capitalist (hence Marx's interest) world had turned very strongly against Russia. There had been 40 years of peace in Europe, but they had been underwritten by a strongly conservative alliance of Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg: no nonsense about parliaments and no nonsense about nationalism and not very much nonsense about religious freedom. The Tsar's army just moved in, whether it was Poland or Hungary, to stop that nonsense. And when in 1850 the king of Prussia very hesitantly suggested some sort of constitution for some sort of non-aggressive Germany (in effect the ancestor, stillborn, of today's Germany), it was the Russian ambassador who said no. Liberals and nationalists fled to Western Europe, and did so via Turkey, where the Sultan refused to hand them over for execution. At the time, the Turks were attempting a sort of proto-version of the reforms that came after the First World War, and they had introduced free trade in 1838 as a way of bringing in British capital (in which they were quite successful). For the Turks this is an interesting time, and they had quite a favourable press. Some of their reforming statesmen (not all: one or two reckoned, not wrongly, that they would do better with a Russian alliance) decided to make a play for alliance with the British and French, in the name of decency and liberalism. These obscure religious haggles therefore grew to a monstrous scale, and a great ideological war resulted: Western liberalism versus Russian reaction.

The Eastern Question — what happens when Turkey goes? — was old enough, going back to 1770, when the Russians smashed the Ottoman fleet off Izmir. That became balance-of-power stuff, superbly written up in Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory (Penguin). Maybe Napoleon and Tsar Alexander could have divided Europe — the Venetian empire for France, the Ottoman Empire for Russia — and defied the British but that did not work. By 1850, ideology was intervening and the Crimean War, in that sense as in many others, is the first modern war. Public opinion counted. It could be mobilised by the press: the first photographs were doing the rounds (I believe the first political photograph is of a barricade in Paris during the June Days proletarian uprising); the telegraph flashed news from far away within hours, for printing next day; buccaneering journalists are at work; the troops, sent by steamship, arrive by a mobilisation plan unthinkable in the days of sail. 

The great Florence Nightingale (I was very glad indeed to see that Figes has paid adequate tribute to a movingly good book on her by Mark Bostridge) is in her way a symbol of the odd anticipations of modernity that occur in the Crimean War. It is maybe something of an irony that Orlando Figes, whose mother Eva is famously a bit of a feminist, is rather better on battles — and he really is astonishingly good at them — than he is on Nightingale. He is indeed good at the battles, and you can sort out the Light Brigade very well.

The one point at which I might query his account is that he does not see that the Crimean War provided a huge shock to the Russian system, which caused Nicholas's son, Alexander II, to say that a vast reform would be needed. That should be the next subject for this extraordinarily talented historian.