Mr Lieven thinks growing resentment at the hierarchical nature of Pakistani society has helped the Taliban.

ECONOMIST: Pakistan

An ancestor of his was Christoph von Lieven, a bright young general in Alexander's entourage.

ECONOMIST: Russia's war against Napoleon

Mr Lieven is no less gripping when he writes about the crucial issue of logistics.

ECONOMIST: Russia's war against Napoleon

Although Mr Lieven does not popularise history, he inevitably touches the nerve points of modern power politics.

ECONOMIST: Russia's war against Napoleon

But it is of great interest to Mr Lieven, one of the ablest historians of imperial Russia.

ECONOMIST: Russia's war against Napoleon

As Mr Lieven cruelly exposes, not only had the Russian army learned nothing from earlier defeats in the Caucasus.

ECONOMIST: Russia and Chechnya

The irony is that although Mr Lieven contests Tolstoy's artistic version of history, his book also revels in it, as its subtitle suggests.

ECONOMIST: Russia's war against Napoleon

His book has the virtues of both journalism and scholarship not surprising, since Mr Lieven used to be a reporter for the Times and is now at King's College, London.

ECONOMIST: Pakistan

Mr Lieven's impressively broad sweep is well complemented by a more tightly focused study of Russian imperialism at work: an excellent, meticulously researched biography of Prince Gregory Potemkin, who in the late 18th century was the most powerful man in Russia.

ECONOMIST: Russian history

Mr Lieven rejects it.

ECONOMIST: Pakistan

The central point made by Mr Lieven's witty and impeccably scholarly book is that Russia owed its victory not to the courage of its national spirit or to the coldness of the 1812 winter, as some French sources have argued, but to its military excellence, superior cavalry, the high standards of Russia's diplomatic and intelligence services and the quality of its European elite.

ECONOMIST: Russia's war against Napoleon