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consequences subsequently acquired considerable significance in Grand hotels are attractive as settings for fictional as well as and diplomatic memoranda that are created within the controlled
the international diplomatic history of professional sport. historically authenticated (and contested) encounters: they bring ambience of the hotel meeting room, are much more accessible
It is, however, no surprise to find that the global headquarters together the public and the private in ways that are conducive to than the informal and unscripted exchanges that the overall hotel
of fifa, the ruling body of association football, the most pervasive, the development of plot and character. Not for nothing, to offer environment makes possible; but this is where the imagination can
successful and commercially lucrative of all professional sports, one example among many, did Anita Brookner win the Booker take wing, and speculation displaces the cold textual analysis of the
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should be located in Switzerland, bringing additional lucrative Prize with a novel set in a Swiss lakeside hotel. When the hotel surviving documents. The international grand hotel generates one
business and diplomatic intrigue to the hotels of Zurich. Swiss hotels, seems to be readily identifiable, the intersection between fiction kind of history, and incubates the other; and this makes it both an
after all, have a long tradition of providing luxurious hospitality on and reality becomes an additional attraction for visitors, as is the exciting and a frustrating place for the historian to inhabit, in the
neutral ground for historically influential international gatherings, case with the Hotel des Bains at Venice’s Lido, where associations necessarily retrospective and distanced mode that the nature of the
while at the same time playing host to dramatic events with with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (first published in 1912), discipline imposes. There is scope for a great deal more work in
international consequences. The Beau-Rivage at Geneva, which reinforced by Visconti’s film of 1971, are further enhanced by the this underdeveloped vein.
opened in 1865, housed (in Room 28, as its website proudly informs naming of the actual hotel’s breakfast restaurant after the novelist.
potential visitors) the meetings of the commissioners appointed to At Cabourg, on the coast of Normandy, devotees of Marcel Proust
investigate British government liability for reparations in the affair visit the Grand Hotel to recapture the lost belle époque ambience
of the blockade runner Alabama during the American Civil War, of Balbec in Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann, an identification
while in 1898 Empress Elizabeth of Austria died at the hotel after reinforced more recently by the English novelist Anthony Powell,
being stabbed by an Italian anarchist, and in 1918 the constitution who wove into his A Dance to the Music of Time novel sequence a
of the newly established Republic of Czechoslovakia was signed fictionalised account of his own wartime visit to Cabourg in the
at a meeting of the provisional government in the hotel’s Room company of an international group of officers and diplomats in the
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59. Lausanne’s Beau-Rivage Palace hosted conferences at which aftermath of D-Day.
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successive re-orderings of extensive tracts of twentieth-century Such examples illustrate the inherent complexity of the
Eastern Europe were decided. The agreement of 1912 that ended relationships between grand hotels and their actual and imagined
the Italo-Turkish War was negotiated here, ratifying the Italian pasts, whether the dominant motifs are political or personal,
takeover of Tripoli and Cyrenaica (fig. 3), and it was followed a founded on historical encounter or refracted through the prism
decade later by the protracted top-level meetings that culminated of the artist’s imagination. Grand hotels, themselves the product
in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, at which much of the Ottoman of a particular historical moment, are obvious locations for the
Empire was formally partitioned in the presence of delegations from meeting of cultures and for dramatic encounters between divergent
Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the emergent interests, channelled and constrained though these are by shared
state that became Yugoslavia, and new boundaries were defined for assumptions about the preferred and expected grammar through
Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. Of genuinely global significance which the civilised self is presented in a managed environment.
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was the conference of 1932 on war reparations and international But the historical encounters themselves, official or unscripted,
disarmament, against a background that included the Nazi rise to are subject to editing, re-writing and re-presentation, whether
power in Germany, and at which Time magazine singled out for by historians, journalists or advertising copywriters, placing layer
attention the magnificent surroundings in which the final session upon layer of interpretation between the events themselves and
was completed, with ‘all bulbs blazing in the white and gold ballroom of those who seek to access them. The formal outcomes of the most
the Hôtel Beau-Rivage’. (figs 1 and 2) carefully scripted and choreographed encounters, the peace treaties
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The Sandoz Room becomes a film set for a programme in the French documentary series
Des racines et des ailes (Roots and Wings), 15 April 2008.

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