Grand Tour (1964)

Richard Perceval Graves is an acclaimed biographer who has now turned the spotlight on his own early life and times. ‘Grand Tour (1964)' is the fourth in a projected series of six memoirs covering the years from 1945-1973. Each volume transcends the personal to become a unique social history of those far-off times.

In this volume Richard Graves provides a fascinating account of what it was like, hitch-hiking where possible, to travel to Istanbul and back again in 1964, taking in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Austria and Germany, as well as Tito’s Yugoslavia. This was the modern equivalent of an eighteenth-century Grand Tour, and Richard visited many of the most famous archaeological sites, museums and art galleries in Europe, including the Forum in Rome, the ruins of Pompeii, Olympia and Delphi; the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, the Deutsche Museum in Munich and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. He was also involved in a train crash in Switzerland and came close to plunging to his death over a Greek precipice.

The majority of the accompanying 48 photographs, which are largely in colour, are contemporary and were taken either by Richard himself or by one of his companions upon this journey.