Fiction
BURNING BARCELONA (Bristol Book Publishing, 2008)
Historical fiction set in Birmingam and Barcelona in the 1830s, when the first steam engine was installed in Spain.
HIGH TIMES AT THE HOTEL BRISTOL (Bristol Book, 2007)
A book of 20 short stories based on events that have happened in some of the 200 or so hotels called Bristol around the world. The Mail on Sunday Travel Book of the Week.
LUNCH WITH ELIZABETH DAVID (Little Brown, 1999, Abacus pbk, 200, 2001, eBook 2011)
A fanciful tale about the travel writer Norman Douglas, his protégé Eric Wolton, and the cookery writer Elizabeth David, who expressed her debt of gratitude to him in her first book. Much of the tale is set in Calabria.
A-TRAIN (Star Books, 1985, eBook 2012)
Imagine a nuclear rail disaster.
AFTERMATH (Star Books, 1982, eBook 2012)
A nuclear thriller, written shortly after Cruise missiles were deployed in the UK. It became recommended reading for local government's 'what to do in emrgency' kit.
Non-Fiction
THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL: a Victorian Masterpiece for the 21st Century (Fitzharding Press, 2003, eBook 2011)
A history of the RAH as London's popular 'village hall', beautifully illustrated after several months' research among the hall's extensive archives, and produed to concide with £73million refurbishment.
OTHER BOOKS
TIME TRAVELLER (WH Smith, 1998)
A history of newspaper and periodical publishing seen through station bookstalls. Copies can be seen at The Newsroom, the Guardian's archive and visitor centre in Farringdon Street.
OVER EUROPE (Weldon Owen/Times Books, 1991)
I provided the extensive captions and a chapter on the history of aerial photography for this exceptional coffee-table book of specially commissioned aerial photographs of the new Europe that was revealed as the Iron Curtain lifted. The main text was by Jan Morris.
Travel guides
For Insight Guides: titles on the UK, Spain, France, Italy, the Baltic States etc.
For Dorling Kindersley: Provence, Barcelona and Catalonia. London Top 10
For Berlitz: Tenerife, Dubrovnik
For Thomas Cook: Barcelona
TIME TRAVELLER (WH Smith, 1998)
A history of newspaper and periodical publishing seen through station bookstalls. Copies can be seen at The Newsroom, the Guardian's archive and visitor centre in Farringdon Street.
OVER EUROPE (Weldon Owen/Times Books, 1991)
I provided the extensive captions and a chapter on the history of aerial photography for this exceptional coffee-table book of specially commissioned aerial photographs of the new Europe that was revealed as the Iron Curtain lifted. The main text was by Jan Morris.
Travel guides
For Insight Guides: titles on the UK, Spain, France, Italy, the Baltic States etc.
For Dorling Kindersley: Provence, Barcelona and Catalonia. London Top 10
For Berlitz: Tenerife, Dubrovnik
For Thomas Cook: Barcelona
For Reader's Digest: The Most Amazing Places to Visit in London
Editor and contributor to many, many more.
4 comments:
Mr. Williams, I have read your blog about Bristol Hotels around the world, and I am a little disappointed that you do not include the Bristol Hotel Tangier in Morocco. This was our family hotel and one with much history, because the first Bristol was in the Old medina (Zoco Chico - Tangier), and later transferred in 1935 to the new city. I have information and photographs and luggage tags for our hotel which started late 1880s and sold in 1970s. I live in Winchester UK, if you want to add info about the Bristol Tangier (which by the way is still operating under the same name, but clearly not a shadow of what it was then) I can fill you in. My email is Tangerine1@btconnect.com. Look forward to talking to you.
John Romero
Dear Mr. Williams:
I read with pleasure and great interest your novel Lunch With Elizabeth David. I'd previously read some of Norman Douglas's work, in particular Looking Back, and found your book referenced on a Wikipedia site describing Douglas.
It did raise a question though. Your novel repeats the naughty anecdote about Herr Krupp and the fireworks. But Douglas stoutly insisted Herr Krupp was innocent of all that. The gentle, elderly philanthropist, the wealthiest man in Europe, "was by far the most prominent man on the island," said Douglas in Looking Back; if Krupp ever took up with fisherboys his neighbor Douglas would have heard of it, even (he obliquely suggests) approved. "He lived in a glass house, and it is asking too much of a fish in an aquarium to engage, unobserved, in homosexual practices." Krupp didn't. Hadn't. Instead, Douglas insists, Krupp's kindness "proved his undoing." He took lessons in Italian from a local teacher and typically, lavished attention on him and overpaid him. A rival teacher, angered and envious as only a Neapolitan can be that he had no such illustrious and lucrative client, out of spite slung at Krupp the worst mud he could think of. The second teacher sent to a Socialist rag called the "Propaganda" anonymous accusations of practices with young boys "with which he himself was familiar--" as he'd previously been convicted of them. Douglas kept a copy of the conviction papers and brandished them whenever the scheming teacher tried to blackmail one of his friends, which was frequent. Another paper, "Avanti," took up the poisonous gossip; then a German socialistic paper "Vorwärts;" it mushroomed into a major scandal fueled by the partisan press. Innocent working class boys ruined by degenerate capitalist. "He was killed by a disgusting press campaign," says Douglas.
I was curious, since you obviously are student of Douglas's writing and presumably familiar with his defense of Krupp, that you chose to go with the fireworks and not with Douglas's effort to put out their sizzle. A feckless effort of course. Rumors fly; the truth walks. And Douglas may have been wrong, at least if William Manchester's Arms of Krupp is to be trusted. Manchester claims the Roman police have in their archives indiscreet photographs of the goings-on in Krupp's grotto, which if true would suggest Norman Douglas is in this instance to be charged, very uncharacteristically, with naïveté.
Jock Yellott
http://books.google.es/books?id=k9x6bjTvascC&pg=PA14&dq=tanger+bristol+hotel&client=firefox-a#PPA26,M1
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