Wednesday 11 August 2010

CITY OF GHOSTS


The Bristol Hotel in Skopje that I wrote about in High Times at the Hotel Bristol is not the only one to have survived disaster. Half a century earlier and 200km to the south, fires roared through Thessaloniki and spared little of this extraordinary, historic city (the waterfront Hotel Splendid is here pictured in flames). The handsome, neoclassical building that is today the five-star Capsis Bristol Hotel was, however, one of the few buildings to have been spared.
I was in Thessaloniki last Easter, the Greek Orthodox one, which this more

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Tuesday 10 August 2010

THE MINISTER WHO DIDN'T PAY HIS BILL

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“When I die you will find the words Ritz Hotel engraved upon my heart.” These are the words of the disgraced government minister Jonathan Aitken. But he might more pertinently have said that the words Hôtel le Bristol would be engraved upon his heart, for it was the Bristol in Villars in Switzerland (pictured right) that revealed his lie about more

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