Racists, pigs and hysterics

I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it costs £300 more than the current value of my car). For this, quite simply, is the funniest book I have read in years.

Its godfather seems to have been Napoleon, whose wars sealed Europe off to the Romantics. In other words, he deprived them of their fixes of the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Prospects of Infinity; the Emperor deprived them of mountains. So where were they to go? ‘Scotland,’ Dr Tegai Hughes observes in an introduction remarkable for its dry humour, ‘might be more familiar and enticing, but Wales was a good deal more accessible.’