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Joy Unconfined! Lord Byron`s Grand Tour Re-Toured
Joy Unconfined!” finds Lord Ian Strathcarron following in Lord Byron’s footsteps, revisiting the places the poet visited two hundred years ago on his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean and comparing what he found then to what one finds there now. At each point the re-Tour meets today’s equivalents to the kings, consuls, governors, chieftains and gangsters that the Grand Tour met before it. Lord Byron completed his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean between 1809 and 1811, leaving England at the age of twenty-one as an undiscovered soul and returning as ‘Byron’, with all that implies: the brand, the baggage and the brio. With the Napoleonic Wars at their most complex, the route of this Grand Tour was to be largely seaborne. Lord Byron’s Grand Tour is recorded as impressions in his own letters and journals, more methodically in the diary of his travelling companion John Cam Hobhouse, and reflected poetically in the first two cantos of the epic poem that was to make his fame and start his legend.Witty and perceptive, the re-Tour reveals much about Lord Byron and much too about how the world has changed in two centuries. Lord Strathcarron himself is an author and adventurer who lives on his yacht Vasco da Gama, writing historical travel books and generally trying to stay out of trouble.