Walter Starkie, a genial, garrulous, and musically talented professor of Spanish and Italian literature, is better known for his unusual means of travel and his inclination toward the nomadic life than for any exotic places he visited. Starkie was raised by a prudish mother and a Victorian father who was determined to train him as a classicist, and much of his life seems to reflect a struggle between the somber occupation of a university don and the romantic lure of a wandering Gypsy life. Frequently the latter tendency won, and it is for his accounts of those periods of rambling that Starkie is mainly remembered. Although he taught and lectured at dozens of universities around the world, his books on the Gypsy life he pursued during summer vacations have delighted readers who did not know and would not have cared that he was also a world-recognized expert on...