The book, beautifully and amusingly written and prodigiously well-informed, is part travelogue and part history. Martin enjoys the whimsical fantasies of English seaside arcana — and it was the railways which spawned the crazy golf courses, the lidos and aquariums, the end-of-pier, what-the-butler-saw diversions; and although railways didn’t invent adultery, they greatly facilitated it.
