Another one from The New Yorker. Do I read anything else? I mean what a bore. Actually, I do. I’m reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land which is cap-I Important and full of very good paragraphs. I’ll post one when I’m done.
Here’s something from Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour”, about the recent rise of Chinese tourists in Europe:
The Grand Tour has been a tradition of newly rich countries ever since young British aristocrats took to the Continent in the eighteenth century, picking up languages, antiques, and venereal disease. Once the railroad arrived, in the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of Britain’s ballooning middle class followed—”lesser men with less fortunes,” suddenly free to “tumble down the Alps in living avalanches,” in the sniffy words of Lord Normanby, the future British Ambassador to France.
Lord Normanby!