Chapter 1: HOW BRISTOL HOTELS GOT THEIR NAME

Why On Earth call a hotel Bristol? This question cropped up nearly twenty years ago when Sophie and I spent a few days away for the first time shortly after we had met. I still look back on that weekend at Le Bristol in Paris with fondness, in spite of the painful break-up a dozen years later. Sophie was French Swiss, bright, brown-eyed, efficient and kind, and to cement our romance we had chosen to spend a weekend in one of the most elegant and historic hotels in the city. Over breakfast on the first morning, as I reached out to dust a croissant crumb from her lower lip, more

Chapter 6: HIGH NOON FOR THE KING'S MOLL

FOR VARIOUS reasons, I have never managed to stay at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna, though I have visited Europe’s “city of music” a couple of times. I know where it is, of course. It is impossible to miss the imposing building on the corner of Kärtnerring where doormen in beige coats with braided epaulettes have tipped their bowler hats to most of the rich and famous who ever came to the Austrian capital. Opened as a hotel in 1892 and expanding into the neighbouring buildings for the next fifty years, more

Chaper 19: SUHA ARAFAT AND THE HOPE DIAMOND

RUE DU FAUBOURG Saint-Honoré just before Christmas is the place to be if you are seriously rich. Paris’s most elegant shopping street is lit up as if, well, as if it were Christmas and Sugar Daddy Santa is coming to town. Dior, Féraud, Versace, Laroche, Hermes, Gaultier, Lanvin, Saint-Laurent… all their windows dazzle with immense discretion and not a price tag is in sight. If you have to ask how much an item is, don’t even bother to walk inside. There are plenty of window-shoppers and a few buyers, too, in old-fashioned furs and chic hats, in labelled scarves, long boots and kid gloves. Taxis prowl, chauffeurs cruise. More