Acknowledgments

A.A.GILL, ED VICTOR, COLMAN JONES, John Money, Sandy Paul, Anthony Bond, Ruth Allen, James Spiers, David Lerner, Robert Spencer, Pamela Hall, Ken Starrett of the Noel Coward Society, David Webster, and all my friends at Cunard. Thank you for your help.

The reason this book is part travel, part memoir is because the hotels featured in this book were the inspiration for my other books on travel. Also the Savoy Hotel gave me my first book launch party. Writers usually have their heroes, or for want of a better word, someone who they admired and inspired them to write and in some cases, travel. For me, it was Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf and her wonderful work A Room of One's Own, with the evocative atmosphere of a truly unique place to stay. Instead of describing these hotels in my memoir (Part Two), I decided to place them separately in Part One.