Eothen: Or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East Book

Say what you will about the Victorians, they had self-confidence up the ying-yang. When Alexander Kinglake did his tour of the Middle East in the 1830's, he was essentially a glorified backpacker - an over-refined product of a bumptious, imperialistic culture. Still, you can't help but marvel at the insouciance with which he charms and blusters his way across the Ottoman empire, browbeating corrupt pashas, strolling nonchalantly through plague-stricken cities, and busting out of tiresome quarantines - all in the firm conviction that nothing can touch him because...well, because he's an English gentleman. And nothing does!

As a writer, Kinglake has a freshness, a colloquial vivacity that you don't often associate with the nineteenth century (though you see it in Byron's letters and a few other 'unofficial' writings of the period). Even when he indulges his taste for purplish lyricism, he has a disarmingly modern trick of ironizing himself, mocking his own pretensions and inviting the reader to snicker along with him. At the same time, he enjoys throwing the odd, sarcastic barb at the conventional idiocies of the civilization he has fled, referring to it at one point as 'that poor, dear, middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, and pains-taking governess, Europe', and comparing it unfavourably to the the wildness and freedom of the East.

In short, an utterly charming book.