Panama brunch

Celebrity chef Cuquita Alvas de Calvo is serving up four-course brunches in the Panama Bristol: see the report in The Panama News. It's $35 a head and, with passionfruit mimosas, is money well spent, says the reviewer.

Hotel Bristol Vienna: a handsome new book

A new book has just been written and produced by Andreas Augustin and his esteemed organisation, Famous Hotels of the World. Between 1900 and 1910 Hotel Bristol in Vienna was "the centre of the intellectual world," according to historian Carl Schorske. Intellectuals, artists, musicians and prominent politicians all found their way here. This handsome publication is fully illustrated with period photographs, and packed with anecdotes and interest: for further details, visit the website.

Of course this luxury hotel's appeal didn't stop in 1910, and you can read all about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson's connection with the Vienna Bristol in High Noon for the King's Moll, taken from High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

Streisand's Bristol moment

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A Barbra Streisand fan named Hart, from Fort Lauderdale, has posted pictures on his blog of the Hotel Bristol in San Francisco from the 1972 film What's Up, Doc?, starring Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. Alongside it is a picture he has taken of the same hotel today – the Hilton, where the action actually took place. The real Hotel Bristol in San Francisco is in the Tenderloin district and it's not as elegant. It's where SCUM manifesto's Valerie Solanas died. You can read about it in "LL Cool J and the Woman Who Shot Andy Warhol", chapter 7 in High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

The Hilton-Bristol connection doesn't end there. You can find out about the heiresses who link the name in "Paris Hilton and Lady Victoria Hervey", chapter 8 in High Times at the Hotel Bristol, which can also be read online.

Gamblers' hotel discount in Russia

So, Russia has once again decided to allow certain areas of the country to run casinos. The move has been hotly debated in the country, and we don't want to get involved in the debate. All we'd like to pass on is the fact that the Hotel Bristol in Yelsk (or Elsk, it gets transliterated a lot different ways), in one the of the chosen regions, is offering a discount on its rates to gamblers. The 36-bedroom 3-star Bristol, pictured here, is a modern business-oriented hotel, but the original Bristol in this trading port on the Sea of Azov opened more than 100 years ago.

Phantom Bristol hotels

Bristol hotels crop up a lot in fiction. It is a landmark in Jan Morris’s convincingly real Mediterranean city state of Hav (“You desperately want the place to exist,” said the Observer book reviewer. “with all its idiosyncrasies - the snowberries that ripen only 'when the early spring suns melt the last of the escarpment's winter snows'; the lethal Roof-Race which is to the people of Hav 'as the bull-running is to Pamplona'."

Roald Dahl had an invented Bristol Hotel in Cannes, in his story Skin, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 just before Christmas. It was a double bluff, as the fact that there is no Bristol hotel in Cannes provided a punchline to the tale.

The Bristol hotel 'in a large city on the Atlantic coast' of America is also the setting for “A Night at the Bristol Hotel” This “ancient edifice of four stories, weather-darkened and squeezed on every side by the overgrowth of the great city....” provides the backdrop for spooky short story that has just been published on a blog by Norman A. Rubin.

And there is City of Ghosts, a story about the Capsis Bristol in Salonica, where Tom Cotton found himself one Easter weekend.

Christmas in Bristols past

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150 years ago On Christmas day 1859 the poet/painter Edward Lear arrived at the Hotel Bristol in Marseilles after a rapid journey across France on the new railways system: "Suffered from heat & cramps at first but wore thro' the night to Dijon at 2½ , & at Lyons by 6½. After that the weather cleared, & I read and looked out of windows at the mountains beyond Valence. All the better for it and afterwards the olives and stones. But the afternoon clouded and became wet. At Marseilles by 3½ . No bother with luggage. Came to Hotel Bristol, washed & dressed by 5 – table d'hôte dinner tolerable. 2 sets of English & a very nice fellow, Dr Chisholm, from India. Came to bed @ 9 and slept well."

There was still a Bristol Hotel in Marseille, at 18 Canabiere (pictured) up until around the 1960s, but there is no longer one there now.

70 years ago On Christmas day 1939 the veteran US journalist Ed Murrow (left) gave his regular 5-minute broadcast from Warsaw: "For reasons of national as well as personal secucrity I am unable to tell you the exact location from where I am speaking," he told his American audience on NBC. "Spread out beyond the roof before me is a vast sea of darkness, patchily illuminated by burning buildings... Off to the west is a line of fire that marks the location of the battle line between the German and Polish armies, a line marked by the muzzle flashes of artillery, flares hanging in the air between the two armies and burning buildings that have been struck by shells. That line goes off beyond the horizon in either direction, reaching all the way to the Lithuanian border in the north and all the way to the Czechoslovak border in the south."

.....In fact Murrow was speaking from the terrace outside the Paderewski suite in the Hotel Bristol, still a high spot in the city.

Scandal of the Bristols

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"The disgrace and disintegration of three aristocratic families" is the sub-title of a new book, Spleandour & Squalor by Marcus Scriven, and it is no surprise to see that the Bristols are one of the three. The fortune of the family that gave its name to the hotel trade was most spectacularly dissipated by John Hervey, the 6th Earl, who is said to have spent £7million on drugs, for which he was at one stage jailed. You can read about him in "LL Cool J and the Man who Shot Andy Warhol", chapter 7 in High Times at the Hotel Bristol. He did, however, not stand much of a chance, being the son of the Victor, the 6th Earl, who had also put in time for robbery and was, according to Scriven, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh's Basil Seal Rides Again: Or, the The Rake's Regress. Victor's story is told in Paris Hilton & Lady Victoria Hervey, which can be read on-line.

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