Michael Portillo’s Scandinavian rail adventure reaches Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, an architectural playground with dazzling contemporary buildings set alongside historic half-timbered houses.

Michael Portillo concludes his epic rail journey across Norway and Denmark, crossing an 18-kilometre box girder bridge between the islands of Funen and Zealand, known as the Great Belt Bridge.

Michael Portillo is transported 150 years back in time to the tiny Alpine village home of Switzerland’s most famous child, Heidi, and heads to the Rhine Gorge, also known as the Swiss Grand Canyon.

Michael Portillo ventures into the bowels of an immense hydroelectric dam to learn how the Swiss use their mountainous environment to power the country.

In Zurich, Michael has a brush with the absurd in the anarchic paintings of the Dadaists and visits the Grossmunster Church to learn about the rebellious pastor at the centre of the Swiss Reformation.

Michael Portillo scales the Swiss Alps on one of the the steepest cog railways in the world and visits the 19th-century fairy-tale Grand Hotel Giessbach.

Aboard the Golden Pass Express, Michael Portillo wends his way in style down steep mountainsides from Interlaken to the Swiss Riviera. In Lausanne, he contends with a knife-wielding robotic arm.

Michael Portillo’s rail travels take him to the north west corner of France, where he explores the beautiful regions of Brittany and Normandy and learns of their connections with Great Britain.

Michael Portillo’s railway adventure reaches Rennes, capital of Brittany. At the Lycee Emile Zola, he hears how the school was used as a military court for the second trial of Alfred Dreyfus.

In Bayeux, Michael Portillo admires the Bayeux Tapestry, the 70-metre-long work of art commissioned to record William the Conqueror's conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

In the apple orchards of the Calvados region, Michael Portillo discovers how the classic digestif has been distilled since 1865 at the Pierre Huet estate.

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Armed with his 1913 Continental Railway Guide, Michael Portillo embarks on a Greek odyssey from Athens's port of Piraeus north to the city of Thessaloniki, captured the year before from the Ottoman Turks, who had ruled much of Greece for 400 years. Exploring the Acropolis and delighting in the tastes of moussaka and baklava, Michael discovers the many influences at play in the creation of modern Greece - from its classical past to the oriental Ottomans and the great European powers of Britain, France and Russia. Along the way, Michael discovers the parlous state of Greek finances at the time of his guidebook. He learns how an aristocratic English poet became a Greek national hero and relives Greek athletic victory at the first modern Olympic games.

Michael Portillo travels by train through Austria and the Czech Republic, following his Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide, published in 1936. Michael’s journey takes him through spectacular scenery, from the handsome Baroque buildings of the northern Austrian city of Linz, through Czech South Bohemia to Prague, the city of a hundred spires, and onto the canyons and caves of the Moravian Karst region near Brno. He finishes on the River Danube in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava.

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