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Source ISBN: 9780006551997

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780007404964

Version: 2016-03-24

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PRAISE

From the reviews of Hotel Tiberias:

‘One half of Hope’s story describes the romantic derring-do soldiering of Hackett, whose steps are traced in a modern-day journey to “Palestine”, the other tracks the more elusive figure of Grossmann, from a family of Templars who settled in Palestine … Hope writes so honestly about his lost German family that we share his urgent desire to acquit them of charges of Nazi sympathies … it is heartening to see [Grossmann] rescued from wartime slanders by a grandson who never knew him but will not let him fade’

Sunday Times

‘Hope indicates a new direction in the British travel book: a post-colonial search for roots and for explanations in their families’ involvement in the recent history of the British imperial endeavour’

TLS

‘Hope is a seasoned travel writer and his descriptive writing is vivid and convincing … [Hotel Tiberias] achieves real pathos. All families have their hidden as well as public histories. Hotel Tiberias gives us a poignant glimpse into a particularly dramatic example’

Independent on Sunday

‘The politics of the Middle East are sketched with verve … Hope’s meditation on his grandfather’s suicide and the region’s history is written with conviction and clarity’

Scotland on Sunday

‘Hope takes us down all sorts of intriguing avenues and gives us a vivid and unusual perspective on an endlessly fascinating chapter of the twentieth century’

Edward Stourton, Tablet

‘Moving, intelligent, highly readable and occasionally extremely funny, this is a fine book indeed’

Geographical Magazine

DEDICATION

In memory of Dore Vorster 1906–2003

and

despite Barnaby

EPIGRAPH

Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain a child forever. For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into that of our ancestors by the records of history?

CICERO, Orator, XXXIV, 120