Lawrence Osborne is not your mother’s travel writer. Ironically, he may be your grandmother’s. This is not to suggest that his new book, Bangkok Days: A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, is stodgy or uptight.

Clarence King (1842-1901) was a well-to-do, Newport-born, Yale-educated geologist famous for mapping the Western United States after the Civil War. He drank tea with Queen Victoria, collected fine art, and counted the novelist Henry James as a close personal friend.

History tells us that General George S. Patton, Jr. sustained life-threatening injuries in a December 1945 automobile accident in occupied Germany and died almost two weeks later of an embolism in a hospital bed.