Laurence Oliphant fascinated his contemporaries, and with good reason. Whereas most of his readers lived highly domesticated, practical lives peppered with an occasional vacation on the British seashore, Oliphant was sending back colorful, opinionated dispatches from locales that were more than exotic. He found himself in politically sensitive places at the precise time their importance to Britain was becoming clear to readers. Among his diplomatic concerns were the increasing threat in the Crimea and the instability in Turkey, the extension of trade to China and Japan, the "mutiny" in India in 1857, the rise of a pan-Islamic movement, the relations between native Americans and their neighbors, and the prospects for a recolonization of Palestine by Eastern European Jews. His eye for the telling detail, his patriotic tone, his unabashed willingness to set off for remote lands to engage people with quite unfamiliar customs--all this made him one of the...