Michael Hughes has provided a solid, remarkable and highly interesting volume on the life and times of Stephen Graham (1884–1975), an exceptionally prolific writer, world traveller and perpetual seeker for meaning in life beyond the domain of the material. The book is particularly useful inasmuch as Stephen Graham is not a well-known figure today, either in his native United Kingdom or especially in the USA. This fact is striking given Graham's staggering amount of published work (more than fifty books and a plethora of articles, columns, commentaries, etc.), and in that he enjoyed wide familiarity during his own time. Russia held an early and enduring fascination for Graham and was the subject of many of his writings; his decades-long passion for tramping far and wide began there, specifically in the Caucasus region of the Russian Empire. Graham was frequently invited to give lectures in high social, political and literary circles on various topics related to his world travels and his published volumes. He also worked for a time at the BBC. As Hughes notes, ‘[h]is love of travel was the product both of his desire to see new things and his hope of discovering places that could speak to his need to find a deeper meaning in the world’ (p. 325, emphasis in original). The usefulness of Beyond Holy Russia is broad-ranging and deserves a correspondingly broad readership. The book is exceptionally well researched, engagingly written and provides a treasure-house of insights into numerous aspects of international affairs during much of the twentieth century. The readership of this Journal is likely to find Beyond Holy Russia useful on numerous counts, central among which is the persisting theme of religious quest on the part of Stephen Graham. As masterfully detailed and explicated by Hughes, the theme of religious quest is repeatedly and emphatically manifest in many if not most of Graham's profusion of written work. Beyond Holy Russia is of course likely to attract those with particular interest in Russian affairs; this reviewer, as a case in point, found numerous innovative insights into subtle nuances of Russian-Anglo relations and Russian-Western relations more generally. None the less the book's subject matter, and the considerable array of subjects discussed, carry the reader well beyond Russian history and Russian affairs in the twentieth century. Students of numerous other aspects of modern life and culture are certain to discover insights into literary, social and political affairs of the twentieth century that justify Hughes's well-chosen title of ‘Beyond Holy Russia’. The author has done a great service to scholarship, and one might say to the largely-forgotten Stephen Graham himself, by reflecting in this superbly researched and delightfully readable book that Graham's efforts and the material results of his labours were not in vain in serving to deepen our appreciation of the complex mosaic of human experience, immanent and transcendent. Again, the book deserves a wide readership.