The captivating story of the famed Savoy Hotel’s founders, told through three generations—and one hundred years—of glamour and high society. For the gondoliers-themed birthday dinner, the hotel obligingly flooded the courtyard to conjure the Grand Canal of Venice. Dinner was served on a silk-lined floating gondola, real swans were swimming in the water, and as a final flourish, a baby elephant borrowed from London Zoo pulled a five-foot high birthday cake. In three generations, the D'Oyly Carte family and London's Savoy Hotel pioneered the idea of the luxury hotel and the modern theater, propelled Gilbert and Sullivan to lasting stardom, made Oscar Wilde a transatlantic celebrity, inspired a P. G. Wodehouse series, and popularized early jazz, electric lights, and Art Deco. Following the history of the iconic Savoy Hotel through three generations of the D'Oyly Carte family, The Secret Life of the Savoy brings to life the extraordinary cultural legacy of the most famous hotel in the world.

‘Addictive, charming and gleaming with Jazz Age glitz’ The Lady The fabulous new novel from the author of The Girl Who Came Home

A POW meets other survivors of World War I in a Polish hotel in this acclaimed classic novel by the author of The Radetzky March. Still bearing the scars from gulag experiences, a freed POW traverses Russia to arrive at the Polish town of Lodz. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal cast of characters, each eagerly awaiting the return from America of a rich man named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself at the time, the hotel is the stage upon which characters follow fate to its tragic destination . . . Praise for Hotel Savoy “Superb Roth: witty, elegant, invariably honing in on the point where history trickles down to the level of the individual character and turns into fate.” —The Nation “Roth’s considerable gift lay in sketching myriad personal convulsions in that time of conflagration.” —Publishers Weekly

Set among the mansions and tennis clubs of Surrey's richest suburb, The Savoy Truffle is a darkly comic drama that evokes an era when Mod gear was fab, the Shorty Nightie shocking, the coffee frothy, and a new Beatles' single brought hysteria to the classroom. The grey post-war years are trembling on the verge of Technicolour, and the Blyte children are struggling to cope with the transition in their own idiosyncratic ways: Hugh's novel is held up by yearning for the Irish au pair; Janey moons over the mystery of men and the enigmatic Black Mini; George wages savage war on his Enemy; and the Moo takes refuge in his exclusive Sloppy Club. A crisis in their parents' lives brings madness and death, a supernatural visitor and an all-too-real tiger... The children have to confront - and conquer - the follies of their elders with wit and invention. Patrick Harpur is the acclaimed author of three novels and three works of non-fiction, including Daimonic Reality, The Philosophers' Secret Fire and Mercurius. He lives in West Dorset, worlds away from his Surrey upbringing.

Journalist Julie Satow's thrilling, unforgettable history of how one illustrious hotel has defined our understanding of money and glamour, from the Gilded Age to the Go-Go Eighties to today's Billionaire Row. From the moment in 1907 when New York millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt strode through the Plaza Hotel's revolving doors to become its first guest, to the afternoon in 2007 when a mysterious Russian oligarch paid a record price for the hotel's largest penthouse, the eighteen-story white marble edifice at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street has radiated wealth and luxury. For some, the hotel evokes images of F. Scott Fitzgerald frolicking in the Pulitzer Fountain, or Eloise, the impish young guest who pours water down the mail chute. But the true stories captured in THE PLAZA also include dark, hidden secrets: the cold-blooded murder perpetrated by the construction workers in charge of building the hotel, how Donald J. Trump came to be the only owner to ever bankrupt the Plaza, and the tale of the disgraced Indian tycoon who ran the hotel from a maximum-security prison cell, 7,000 miles away in Delhi. In this definitive history, award-winning journalist Julie Satow not only pulls back the curtain on Truman Capote's Black and White Ball and The Beatles' first stateside visit-she also follows the money trail. THE PLAZA reveals how a handful of rich, dowager widows were the financial lifeline that saved the hotel during the Great Depression, and how, today, foreign money and anonymous shell companies have transformed iconic guest rooms into condominiums that shield ill-gotten gains-hollowing out parts of the hotel as well as the city around it. THE PLAZA is the account of one vaunted New York City address that has become synonymous with wealth and scandal, opportunity and tragedy. With glamour on the surface and strife behind the scenes, it is the story of how one hotel became a mirror reflecting New York's place at the center of the country's cultural narrative for over a century.

Biography of the grandniece of Louis XIV and wife of the heir apparent to the throne of France.

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Ritz and Escoffier. In a tale replete with scandal and opulence, Luke Barr, author of the New York Times bestselling Provence, 1970, transports readers to turn-of-the-century London and Paris to discover how celebrated hotelier César Ritz and famed chef Auguste Escoffier joined forces at the Savoy Hotel to spawn a scandalously modern luxury hotel and restaurant, signaling a new social order and the rise of the middle class. In early August 1889, César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier highly regarded for his exquisite taste, found himself at the Savoy Hotel in London. He had come at the request of Richard D'Oyly Carte, the financier of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operas, who had modernized theater and was now looking to create the world's best hotel. D'Oyly Carte soon seduced Ritz to move to London with his team, along with Auguste Escoffier, the chef de cuisine known for his elevated, original dishes. The two created a hotel and restaurant like no one had ever experienced, in often mysterious and always extravagant ways, where British high society mingled with American Jews and women. Barr deftly re-creates the thrilling Belle Epoque era just before World War I, when British aristocracy was at its peak, women began dining out unaccompanied by men, and American nouveaux riche and gauche industrialists convened in London to show off their wealth. In their collaboration at the still celebrated Savoy Hotel, the pair welcomed loyal and sometimes salacious clients, such as Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt; Escoffier created the modern kitchen brigade and codified French cuisine in his seminal Le Guide culinaire, which remains in print today; and Ritz, whose name continues to grace the finest hotels, created the world's first luxury hotel. The pair also ruffled more than a few feathers. Fine dining and luxury travel would never be the same--or more intriguing.

With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

Salvador Dalí once asked room service at Le Meurice in Paris to send him up a flock of sheep. When they were brought to his room he pulled out a gun and fired blanks at them. George Bernard Shaw tried to learn the tango at Reid's Palace in Madeira, and the details of India's independence were worked out in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Delhi. The world's grandest hotels have provided glamorous backgrounds for some of the most momentous – and most bizarre – events in history. Adrian Mourby is a distinguished hotel historian and travel journalist – and a lover of great hotels. Here he tells the stories of 50 of the world's most magnificent, among them the Adlon in Berlin, the Hotel de Russie in Rome, the Continental in Saigon, Raffles in Singapore, the Dorchester in London, Pera Palace in Istanbul and New York's Plaza, as well as some lesser known grand hotels like the Bristol in Warsaw, the Londra Palace in Venice and the Midland in Morecambe Bay. All human life is to be found in a great hotel, only in a more entertaining form.

'The Secrets of Chimneys' by Agatha Christie is a classic mystery novel that unfolds against the backdrop of an English country estate called Chimneys. The story follows the protagonist, Anthony Cade, who becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue and deception. The Narrative kicks off when Anthony Cade, a charming but down-on-his-luck adventurer, is approached by a friend, Jimmy McGrath, to help deliver a political document to the English government. The Secrets of Chimneys is a masterfully crafted mystery novel that keeps readers guessing until the very end. With its intricate plot and cleverly concealed clues, the novel showcases Christie's unparalleled skill as the queen of crime fiction.