Darrel Ince

I am a retired Professor of Computer Science and used to work at the British Open University, both the biggest and the best university in the United Kingdom! I was the author of around 20 very technical books. I am now writing a series of guidebooks to the major cities of Europe. I was prompted to write these books by two events. The first was wandering around Vienna with a very poor and very expensive guidebook; the second was passing a shop in Paris which had dead rats in the window. I decided to write both useful guides and also ones which contained quirky and little known attractions such as the dead rat shop (it was a shop that sold pest control products). For example, everyone knows about the Eiffel Tower, but how many tourists that visit Paris know about the Musee Marmottan Monet, a relatively unknown art gallery containing over three hundred impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, and nobody seems to know about the delightfully quirky Deyrolle taxidermy shop. So my aim is to not only to cover the big tourist attractions, but also the ones that you may never think of visiting. I have just published the first guide 'The Perplexed Tourist's Guide to Paris' and am currently working on 'The Perplexed Tourist's Guide to London', scheduled to be published in March 2015.