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

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.

A critically acclaimed early work from the author of The Radetzky March--one of the most significant literary German novels ever written After the end of World War I, Gabriel Dan is released from a POW camp in Russia and begins making his way home to Austria. He comes to an industrial town in Poland, and checks in the ramshackle Hotel Savoy while awaiting financial aid from his family. Here he meets a kaleidoscope of characters, a microcosm of society in which rich and poor, itinerants, dissidents, and malcontents live lives of hope, expectancy, and despair in an atmosphere pregnant with revolutionary fervor.

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

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.