Concerned of Melton Mowbray thinks that all this bad behaviour is a recent phenomenon; the undoubted legacy of 60s liberalism, the break-up of the family unit, and the decline of corporal punishment. In the good old days, it was all courtesy and manners, donkeys and deckchairs, respect for the elders, and wholesome family fun. Or was it?

A dip into the archives suggests that British behaviour abroad has actually been remarkably consistent over the last three centuries. Consider this comment on tourism from the 18th-century diarist Samuel Johnson: ‘The greater part of travellers tell nothing, because their method of travelling supplies them with nothing to be told.'

Back then, only the rich and well-to-do could afford to go abroad. These so-called Grand Tours typically took in Renaissance hotspots like Paris and Rome. But behind the illustrious façade lay a more familiar reality: the typical tourist rarely made any effort to learn the language; displayed only the most superficial interest in the actual sight-seeing; and was insensitive to local attitudes and ideas. The French, for instance, were routinely berated for not being English.

A century later, Francis Galton, polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin, picked up the theme on his way to the Danube: ‘The more you see the more you are convinced of the superiority of England. However nothing can be so admirable as a German or Frenchman who loves his country; it must be a great and genuine patriotism to be able thus to prefer it.'

Perhaps the diarist Francis Kilvert had Galton in mind when he famously wrote: ‘Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive, and loathsome is the British tourist.'