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Language is still a relatively under-researched aspect of the Grand Tour. This book offers a comprehensive introduction enriched by the amusing stories and vivid quotations collected from travellers' writings, providing crucial insights into the rise of modern vernaculars and the standardisation of European languages.
This work examines the forms of language that map out Italy as an imaginative topography of pleasure within British and French travel writing, over the period 1600 to 1830. It considers the tour with reference to strategies of description and themes.
For members of the social elite in 18th-century England, extended travel for pleasure came to be considered part of an ideal education as well as an important symbol of social status. Italy, and especially Rome - a fashionable, exciting, and comfortable city - became the focus of such early tourists' interest. In this book, historian Jeremy Black recreates the actual tourist experiences of those who travelled to Italy on a Grand Tour. Relying on the private diaries and personal letters of travellers, rather than on the self-conscious accounts of literary travellers who wrote for wider audiences, the book presents an authentic picture of how British tourists experienced Italy, its landscapes, women, food, music, Catholicism, and more. illustrations, the book highlights the discrepancy between the idealised view of the Grand Tour and its reality: what people were meant to do was not necessarily what they did, what the guide books described as splendid was not always so perceived. Black quotes British visitors as they reflect on their trips, and he discusses what their Italian experiences meant to them. And he considers the intriguing effects of tourism on British culture during this most exciting of centuries.
In the vein of the classic Johnny Cash: The Life, this groundbreaking work explores the wild life and extraordinary musical career of “the definitive country singer of the last half century” (New York Times), who influenced, among others, Bob Dylan, Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris, John Fogerty, George Strait, Alan Jackson, and Garth Brooks. In a masterful biography laden with new revelations, veteran country music journalist/historian Rich Kienzle offers a definitive, full-bodied portrait of legendary country singer George Jones and the music that remains his legacy. Kienzle meticulously sifted through archival material, government records, recollections by colleagues and admirers, interviewing many involved in Jones’s life and career. The result: an evocative portrait of this enormously gifted, tragically tormented icon called “the Keith Richards of country.” Kienzle chronicles Jones’s impoverished East Texas childhood as the youngest son of a deeply religious mother and alcoholic, often-abusive father. He examines his three troubled marriages including his union with superstar Tammy Wynette and looks unsparingly at Jones’s demons. Alcohol and later cocaine nearly killed him until fourth wife Nancy helped him learn to love himself. Kienzle also details Jones’s remarkable musical journey from singing in violent Texas honky tonks to Grand Ole Opry star, hitmaker and master vocalist whose raw, emotionally powerful delivery remains the Gold Standard for country singers. The George Jones of this heartfelt biography lived hard before finding contentment until he died at eighty-one—a story filled with whiskey, women and drugs but always the saving grace of music. Illustrated with eight pages of photos.
According to Bruce Redford, the Tour offered a heady combination of aesthetic, social political, and sexual experience, and it provided its alumni with a life-long source of cultural and political authority. Yet from the beginning the Tour was also viewed with deep suspicion: it was feared that the very experiences that completed the British gentleman might well undo him.
Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. In this fascinating travelogue of the prolific author's yearlong trip around the British Empire in 1922, Christie provides the clues to the origins of the plots and locales of some of her bestselling mystery novels. Containing never-before-published letters and photos from her travels, and filled with intriguing details about the exotic locations she visited, The Grand Tour is a must-have for Agatha Christie fans, revealing an unexpected side to the world's most renowned mystery writer. In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a ten-month voyage around the world. Her husband, Archibald Christie, had been invited to join a trade mission to promote the British Empire Exhibition, and Christie was determined to go with him. It was a life-changing decision for the young novelist, a true voyage of discovery that would inspire her future writing for years to come. Placing her two-year-old daughter in the care of her sister, Christie set sail at the end of January and did not return home until December. Throughout her journey, she kept up a detailed weekly correspondence with her mother, describing the exotic places and the remarkable people she encountered as the mission traveled through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Canada. Reproduced here for the first time, the letters are full of tales of seasickness and sunburn, motor trips and surfboarding, glamor and misery. The Grand Tour also brings to life the places and people Christie encountered through the photos she took on her portable camera, as well as some of the original postcards, newspaper cuttings, and memorabilia she collected on her trip. Edited and introduced by Agatha Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, and accompanied by reminiscences from her own autobiography, this unique travelogue reveals a new adventurous side to Agatha Christie, one that would ultimately influence the stories that made her a household name.
The world is a big place full of interesting things. And The Grand Tour has seen some of them. That’s why few people are better placed to lead you around this vast planet of ours than Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. As long as you don’t mind getting hot and lost. Welcome, everyone, to The Grand Tour Guide to The World.
