“They are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality.”

Never has a coach been so eloquently painted in the reader’s mind. Moreover, with all the human touches that make you realise you are learning more about the author than about the place being visited,

“I spent the next day, which was fine and warm, at Bournville. There were several good reasons for doing this. To begin with, I was interested in the manufacture of chocolate, having bought and eaten in my time great quantities of the stuff, and having several times, when I was about ten tried unsuccessfully to make it myself.”

The book does more than present big adjectives and quirky childhood anecdotes. Priestly considers the fate of the industrial class and the economic state of Britain, post the Great War (1914-1918) in an insightful way by stepping out of middle-class London and right into the lives of the British working class.

This is a delightful read, better than Theroux’s (normally my favorite travel writer) rather turgid English travel writing, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain, penned in 1982.

The main character is a Scottish merchant called Dirk Struan, whose tale is interwoven beautifaully with a historical and economical narrative about life in The Orient in Victorian times.