Hotel Bristol Skopje in 3D

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A new 3D view of the old Hotel Bristol is Skopje has just been published by guitardemon, based in Thessaloniki, and if you click on the link you can see the building rotate through 360 degrees. Built in the 1924, the Hotel Bristol was one of the few buildings to survive the 1963 earthquake which has left the nearby railway station clock stopped at 5.17. Rebecca West is said to have stayed here, and today it has a gambling casino. A story of the Hotel Bristol and the earthquake is told in High Times at the Hotel Bristol, and can be heard in a podcast.

Isiaih Berlin at the Hotel Bristol, Beaulieu-sur-Mer

In January 1938 Isiaih Berlin, then 19 and at Oxford, was staying at The Hotel Bristol in Beaulieu in the South of France. This is part of a letter he wrote to Stephen Spender:

"The Riviera is dreary and hateful beyond belief. I had no choice but to go to this place, since I wished to finish Marx & at the same time not be totally isolated since in absolute solitude I tend to go mad. As a result I am living in luxury against which I have violent petit bourgeois feelings: look at Sir J Simon [Chancellor of the Exchequor, 1st Viscount Stackpool] and your uncle sitting under the trees of the Jardin Exotique: but am in fact writing very fast and ferociously. The weather is very good, which for one I dislike, since it gives open pleasure to so many detestable people: really you ought to come here and get a taste of the kind of society which produced the anarchists & dynamiters of 1880-90."

The hotel no longer exists. I think it probably didn't survive the Second World War.