TRAVELS WITH A SUPERIOR PERSON

Edited by
PETER KING

Introduced by
ELIZABETH LONGFORD

SIDGWICK & JACKSON LIMITED
1985

First edition.
My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

Curzon hated this 'accursed doggerel' — penned by a fellow undergraduate during his years at Balliol — but it accurately sums up the man who, in his twenties, visited and conversed with kings, emperors, potentates, and despots and who, in later life, became Viceroy of India, Foreign Secretary and very nearly Prime Minister.

In his introduction to his book of reminiscences, Tales of Travel (1923), Curzon wrote: 'It gave me greater pleasure to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for exploration and research than it did to become a Minister of the Crown. After India, travel was his greatest love. Before he was thirty years old he had been twice round the world, supporting himself by writing for The Times.

No traveller of the period had a prose style to match that of Curzon, nor did they have his wit. It is these qualities, coupled with Curzon's fascinating experiences in remote and exotic places, that make Travels with a Superior Person both the quintessence of late-Victorian travel-writing and a delight for modern readers.

Here we have the pick of Curzon the traveller, extracted from his Russian in Central Asia (1889), Tales of Travel (1923), and Leaves from a Viceroy's Note-book (1926). We have brief anecdotes: Curzon pilfering a top hat in Teheran; impersonating a judge in Milan; or showing the Prince of Wales a naughty picture from Annam We have rich and poetic descriptive writing: on Japanese wrestling; the magnificence of the Nile; Greece in the 1880s; and other sublime subjects. We also have Curzon's full and remarkable account of his journey by train in 1888 from London to Samarkand via Berlin, St Petersburg, Moscow, the Caspian Sea, the Oxus, and Bokhara (described here as 'the most interesting city in the world') and on by road to Tashkent.

Throughout Travels with a Superior Person the reader is transported by Curzon's superb powers of description, his humour, and the poetry of his flawless prose. The book is illustrated with 90 contemporary photographs, most of them from Curzon's own collection.

Travels with a Superior Person is the companion volume to A Viceroy's India (1984), that contains the best of Cur'zon's writing on India.

Lord Curzon (1859-1925) or, to use his full title, the First Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, had all the advantages which come from being an heir to a peerage, an Etonian, a fellow of All Souls, a Member of Parliament and, at the age of 39, Viceroy of India. He also married an American heiress. Many people expected him to go on to become Prime Minister, and none so fervently as he did; but alas, although he became Foreign Minister, he never reached the very top. History will perhaps remember him not as a failed statesman, but as one of the finest of travel writers, who published vivid and stylish accounts of his experiences, from his first world tour when he was 28 to Tales of Travel two years before his death in 1925.

26 x 19 cm. 191 pp.

Very good condition. Dust jacket and page edges slightly age toned. Previous owner's name on the reverse of the front free endpaper but otherwise clean and tidy.