Part detective work, part treasure chest, full of history and scandal, The Gilded Chalet takes you on a grand tour of two centuries of great writing by both Swiss and foreign authors and shows how Switzerland has always been at the center of literary Europe. Two centuries after the Romantics went there to invent Gothic horror, the lure of Switzerland hasn't left us. Writers from the Fitzgeralds to Fleming, Highsmith to Hemingway, Conan Doyle to le Carré, came to escape world wars, political persecution, tuberculosis. They came for sanctuary (from oppression or the tax man), for fresh air and nude sunbathing, for scenery resembling, as Rooney puts it, 'Mother Nature on steroids.' Patricia Highsmith spent her last years in a granite home in Ticino with a fridge containing little but peanut butter and vodka. Hermann Hesse had himself buried to the neck as a cure for alcoholism. Nabokov chased butterflies and played tennis on the hotel courts. When it comes to literature, it seems all roads lead to Switzerland. Padraig Rooney peers through the chalet windows and discovers how Switzerland has influenced some of the greatest authors and characters of literature.

A travel diary from 1863 inspires author Diccon Bewes to retrace Thomas Cook's historic train trip that revolutionized tourism forever.

A Financial Times Book of the Year and international bestseller.

It’s clear to see why Tokyo is a source of fascination for travellers. Streets of towering neon that never sleep hide warren-like alleys filled with lanterns, vending machines and tiny bars where businessmen drink the latest seasonal beers. Tokyo is a collection of precincts, each with its own personality. Go shopping mad in Shinjuku, tap into Tokyo’s youth culture in Harajuku and Shibuya, go vintage shopping in Koenji, check out the latest gadgets in Akihabara or step back in time in old-world Asakusa. The book is divided into 19 precincts, with a chapter covering each, featuring the very best of Tokyo’s shopping, eating and drinking experiences. Interviews with creative Tokyoites also highlight favourite haunts, and additional information at the front and back offers expert travel tips. Precinct maps make this a handy guidebook, while the hardback cover creates a beautiful keepsake.

“Truly a great book—unique, invaluable and unapproachable as the gold standard of the genre… Bemelmans got there first, more frequently, and better.” —Anthony Bourdain Acerbic, colorful, and spirited stories from a bygone era: behind the scenes in a grand NY hotel, from the author of the Madeline books Picture David Sedaris writing Kitchen Confidential about the Ritz in New York in the 1920s, which had the style and charm of The Grand Budapest Hotel… In this charming and uproariously funny hotel memoir, Ludwig Bemelmans uncovers the fabulous world of the Hotel Splendide—the thinly disguised stand-in for the Ritz—a luxury New York hotel where he worked as a waiter in the 1920s. With equal parts affection and barbed wit, he uncovers the everyday chaos that reigns behind the smooth facades of the gilded dining room and banquet halls. In hilarious detail, Bemelmans sketches the hierarchy of hotel life and its strange and fascinating inhabitants: from the ruthlessly authoritarian maître d'hôtel Monsieur Victor to the kindly waiter Mespoulets to Frizl the homesick busboy. Illustrated with his own charming line drawings, Bemelmans' tales of a bygone era of extravagance are as charming as they are riotously entertaining. “[Bemelmans] was the original bad boy of the NY hotel/restaurant subculture, a waiter, busboy, and restaurateur who “told all” in a series of funny and true (or very near true) autobiographical accounts of backstairs folly, excess, borderline criminality, and madness in the grande Hotel Splendide… If you like stories about old New York as I do, this classic will have you laughing out loud.” –Anthony Bourdain