John Pemble: 2 books

For a thousand years, Rome was enshrined in myth and legend as the Eternal City. No Grand Tour would be complete without a visit to its ruins. But from 1870 all that changed. A millennium ended as its solitary moonlit ruins became floodlit monuments on traffic islands, and its perimeter shifted from...

'The only remarkable thing people can tell of their doings these days is that they have stayed at home', declared George Eliot in 1869. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain travel became the rage. The middle classes and the aristocracy seemed in a constant flux of arrival and departure, their...