Diana Cooper, snapped in 1920 as herself, but in her passport posed as Cleopatra. Photo: APIC/GETTY IMAGES

In 1641, John Evelyn recorded his arrival at the fort of Lillo, near Antwerp: 

“The Governor… demanded my pass, to which he set his hand and asked for two rix-dollars for a fee, which methought appeared very unhandsome in a soldier of his quality. I told him that I had purchased my pass at the Commissaries at Rotterdam, at which, in a great fury snatching the the paper out of my hand, he flung it scornfully under a table and bade me try whether I could get to Antwerp without his permission.”

Laurence Sterne in his novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, described his travels in France in 1762:

“When I got home to my hotel [in Paris], La Fleur told me I had been inquired after by the Lieutenant de Police—The deuce take it! said I—I know the reason. It is time the reader should know it… I had left London with so much precipitation, that it never enter’d my mind that we were at war with France [the Seven Years’ War]; and had reach’d Dover, and look’d through my glass at the hills beyond Boulogne, before the idea presented itself; and with this in its train, that there was no getting there without a passport. Go but to the end of a street, I have a mortal aversion for returning back no wiser than I set out; and as this was one of the greatest efforts I had ever made for knowledge, I could less bear the thoughts of it; so hearing the Count de—had hired the packet, I begg’d he would take me in his suite. The Count had some little knowledge of me, so made little or no difficulty—only said, his inclination to…

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