In love with the hotel

The second winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction will be unveiled next month. Alongside books of memoir, science and biography, this year’s shortlist features two titles in which hotels are the main character: The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet and Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska.

Nonfiction aside, hotels have long been compelling settings for dramas of all kinds: novels (Hotel du Lac, A Gentleman in Moscow), TV (The White Lotus, Fawlty Towers) and film (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Lost in Translation) make use, too. 

Eclipse of Peace

On May 28, 585 B.C., a rare celestial event turned a battlefield into a place of peace. As the armies of King Alyattes II of Lydia and King Cyaxares of the Medes prepared for yet another clash, the midday sun suddenly vanished. Day became night. This unexpected darkness—now known as the Eclipse of Peace—stunned both sides and brought an abrupt halt to the war. Abdul Moeed, Greek Reporter

The Life and Death of the Book Review

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. [...] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics, instead taking their lead from celebrities like Oprah, or online influencers. The authoritative middlebrow cultural figures who once instructed Americans on what to read from perches at the Saturday Review and the New Yorker no longer exist (Adam Gopnik does not dictate American reading habits). The very idea of such cultural authority is widely dismissed as elitist. David A. Bell, Liberties

 

Gin and Secrets

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war. Richerd Norton-Taylor, Literary Review

spie, Russia e Gran Bretagna: recensione a: Antonia Senior, The Soviet Network. Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire (Hodder & Stoughton).