Joy Unconfined

Lord Byron’s Grand Tour is recorded as impressions in his own letters and journals, more methodically in the diary of his travelling companion John Cam Hobhouse, and reflected poetically in the first two cantos of the epic poem that was to make his fame and start his legend. Lord Strathcarron’s re-Tour follows in Byron’s footsteps, revisiting the places the poet visited two hundred years ago and comparing what he found then to what one finds there now. At each point the re-Tour meets today’s equivalents to the kings, consuls, governors, chieftains and gangsters that the Grand Tour met before it. Witty and perceptive, the re-Tour reveals much about Lord Byron and much too about how the world has changed in two centuries.