The balance of the two contradictory journeys, the order implying an ironic inversion of the Russian establishment's assertion of progress – first Russia, then Tibet – makes this a difficult book, two in one, but for the patient reader a rewarding volume. As Byron comments: "This book presents two excursions whose very diversity is symbolic of those formidable contradictions which make it a privilege and a puzzle to be alive in the twentieth century."

Among Byron's 'Brideshead' contemporaries Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming, who outsold him at the time, he has proved far more influential on later writers. Byron's subsequent Road to Oxiana was declared by Bruce Chatwin to be a "sacred text" and "beyond criticism", and in the witty Byron – a camp aesthete with an amateur brilliance in art history and a penchant for exotica – it is not hard to see why Chatwin became a devotee.

Many of the qualities admired in Oxiana are present in First Russia, then Tibet: the passages of intensely beautiful description or the deft ability to generalise epigrammatically about a culture; but it lacks the episodic, mosaic quality of Oxiana, which appears to be so carelessly put down but is, in fact, rigorously studied.