Continental Drifter

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£7.99

Financed by a bet with a Yeovil linen draper, court jester Thomas Coryate's 1608 journey to Venice and back was an unlikely template for the Grand Tour.

Almost four hundred years later, Tim Moore put on a ridiculous velvet suit and set off in Coryate's tracks at the wheel of a senile Rolls-Royce.
Treading on frugality and the bawdy self-indulgence of the later Grand Tourists, Moore's confrontations with Continental croupiers, nudists, sugar-beer farmers and an offshore welders are a grotesque blend of Baldrick and Blackadder.

While charting the decline of the Grand Tour from the sombre academy of cultural betterment to the Club 18-30 of the 1830s, Moore also resurrects the reputation of Coryate, whose reward for introducing the fork to Britain and coining the word 'umbrella' was ridicule, poverty and an almost unbearably poignant ending in India.