All over fair Chicago, more toasts to The Clumsiest People in Europe, in the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. Here's Henry Kisor in the latter:

If you thought Evelyn Waugh and Paul Theroux were the most disagreeable travel writers ever, make room for Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, an Englishwoman who never left home. Between 1849 and 1854 she published three travel books of singular ill temper. The French, she wrote, "like being smart, but are not very clean." Russians are "civil, but sly and dishonest, and fond of drinking." The Irish subscribe to "the Roman Catholic religion. It is a kind of Christian religion, but a very bad kind."

Nasty as her sentiments were, she delivered them engagingly, and Todd Pruzan has collected the most bizarre into The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World (Bloomsbury, $19.95).

Just the thing to help get through the long wait at airport security.