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Smollett, Tobias

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, [23] 35; Travels through France and Italy, [26] 7

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Stinks and Germs

Michele Hanson on Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Last year I was invited to join a friend’s book group. I plodded through the book they’d chosen that week – a particularly ghastly and badly written effort by some minor celebrity – and naturally expressed my distaste at their meeting. Why had they chosen such rubbish? I thought book groups were meant to stretch the mind. And so they suggested, as I thought myself so clever, that I should choose their next book.
20100601161151 Oliver Pritchett, Tobias Smollett - Slightly Foxed Issue 26

A Nightmare on Wheels

Oliver Pritchett on Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy

I have a horror of scenes. I hate rows about money and I’m in misery when an Englishman abroad goes on about bloody foreigners and turns into a bully. So there is no reason for me to love Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy; I see Smollett as the man in Reception at the holiday hotel, puffing himself up and demanding to speak to the manager. Yet the cantankerous old blighter somehow always manages to win me over.

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