Lucy Lethbridge

Daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was a child prodigy. Brilliant at maths, she read numbers like most people read words. In 1834 she came to the attention of scientist Charles Babbage, who had just built an amazing 'thinking machine'. Thus began a remarkable collaboration in the invention of computer. 

True stories from the Golden Age of Piracy (15th to the 18th century), when corsairs ruled the waves all over the world.

In 1815 the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end the Napoleonic Wars and the European continent opened up once again to British tourists. The nineteenth century was to be an age driven by steam technology, mass-industrialisation and movement, and, in the footsteps of the Grand Tourists a hundred years earlier, the British middle-classes flocked to Europe to see the sights.

In Tourists, the voices of these travellers - puzzled, shocked, delighted and amazed - are brought vividly to life. From the discomfort of the stagecoach to the 'self-contained pleasure palace' of the beach resort, Lucy Lethbridge brilliantly examines two centuries of tourists' experience. Among a range of disparate characters, we meet the commercial titans of Victorian tourism, Albert Smith, Henry Gaze and Thomas Cook, as well as their successor, Vladimir Raitz, the creator of the modern beach holiday.