The Grand Tour of William Beckford

As a child, Mozart reputedly taught him five-finger exercises on the piano, Alexander Cozens, self-styled bastard of Peter the Great, taught him to draw. The remainder of his education was completed under the baleful eye of a personal tutor, and in his father's well stocked library. By the time he set out on his Grand Tour at the age of twenty, he was better equipped than most (not least because he possessed a lively sense of the ridiculous) to value the beauties and idiosyncrasies of a Europe that was shortly to vanish for ever. As we rattle along with him towards Venice and Rome by way of Holland, Germany and the Alps, he not only evokes viividly his stops en route, but inadvertently reveals much of himself. Ardent lover, concert goer, snob, fanatical non-smoker and conservationist, given to wildly varied moods, he is charming, touchy, infuriating, but never dull. This selection, which includes unpublished material—and a short biography—is drawn from one of the five surviving copies of Beckford's published account of his Tour. Thinking it too revealing of his inner nature, Beckford burned the rest. Description from the back cover of this Penguin edition.