An idle English gentleman travels to a small central European kingdom to watch a coronation, meets the king in the forest the day before and turns out to be his double - and when the king is drugged, the coronation cannot be postponed. Hope wrote it in a month, invented the whole genre of Ruritanian romance, and gave the language a word for it. Fifty-eight plates of ships, campfires, glaciers and far harbours, among them Winslow Homer and Raden Saleh, carry the wandering, out-of-place feeling at the heart of the tale.
