For more than 200 years, British travellers combed Europe for the relics of classical antiqyity and monuments of the baroque. That was the Grand Tour. With this book, Godfrey Hodgson proposes a New Grand Tour into the beginings of our own world: the Europe of the modernists and the modern. The tour takes the reader through seven cities: Rome, Paris and London, Berlin and Vienna, Prague and St Petersburg. In each, Hodgson focuses on the men and women who created the modern mind and relates them to the world they lived in.