Tourists: How the British went Abroad to Find Themselves
Lucy Lethbridge
Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20
Dostoyevsky, suffering from constipation in the spa town of Bad Ems, wrote to his wife: “I am to take vinegar with salad.” As Lucy Lethbridge reminds us, he was not the only one. Cleverly written and beautifully produced, this book manages the near-impossible. It weaves sensitively and non-pedantically through all the pertinent points about tourism from the United Kingdom to continental Europe while bringing out a surprisingly profound and ponderable overall narrative. Luckily, she also occasionally permits interlopers with particularly lofty literary antecedents from other countries to put in an illuminating anecdote.
