Jonathan Keates writes about The Portable Paradise for the Independent. 

"I can't honestly remember how I began collecting guidebooks. It had something to do, maybe, with an enormous novel, forever in progress, which I wrote as an undergraduate. Set in France, Germany and Italy in the years immediately before 1914, this interminable work, to which I subjected my long-suffering friends, was provisionally entitled The Marquis or They Are Not to be Had on the Spot."