Jane Rogoyska

Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth

Surviving Katyn

Gustav Klimt

How life was lived in one of Paris's great hotels, before, during and after the Second World War The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only 'grand' hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service - and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska's extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century's most devastating events.

Paris in the Shadow of War

Hotel Exile

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION The extraordinary story of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris—once a hub for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis after 1933, later commandeered by German military intelligence during the occupation, and finally, after Liberation, a refuge for survivors returning from concentration camps. A hotel is not an actor in a drama but the stage upon which dramas unfold. The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution—the only grand hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Since its opening in 1905, it has been a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. But in the years before, during, and after the second World War, the hotel had a darker, more tragic history—a place in the shadow of Nazism. Set in Paris from 1933 to 1945, Hotel Exile recounts the real stories whose lives intersected at the famed Lutetia over the course of 12 transformative years. From artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany, including Walter Benjamin, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett; to German counterintelligence officers who commandeered the hotel during the Occupation; and finally, Holocaust survivors and displaced persons who found refuge there after Liberation, Jane Rogoyska brings to life the emotions, dilemmas, and fates of outsiders existing on the edges of war. Rogoyska explores what it meant for three profoundly different groups to live in exile, while passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and finally, a shelter and place of healing. Vital and tragic, Hotel Exile interweaves portraits of people connected by race, nationality, language, and a legendary Paris establishment, under the dark ideology that dictated the course of lives around the world.

Paris in the Face of Fascism and the Shadow of War, 1933-1945

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NONFICTION A FOYLES TOP TEN READ FOR FEBRUARY | A 2026 HIGHLIGHT IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD AND THE BOOKSELLER A meeting place for Europe’s bohemian artists. A headquarters of the Nazi occupation. A shelter for camp survivors. This is the true story of how one Paris hotel came to hold the weight of a century. The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.

Frances Alexander

Modigliani (1884-1920), a painter who didn’t find much happiness in his native Italy, managed only to find sorrow in France. From this unhappiness was born an original style of painting, influenced by African art, Cubism, and nights of drinking in Montparnasse. His female nudes, with their profound sensuality, aggressive nudity, and enigmatic faces, express the suffering and lack of recognition of Modigliano. He died at the age of 36. This book is made up of paintings which created scandals in their day, but which nowadays are considered inoffensive.

Amedeo Modigliani

Patrick Bade

“I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women...”Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt’s paintings speak of a world of opulence and leisure, which seems aeons away from the harsh, post-modern environment we live in now. The subjects he treats – allegories, portraits, landscapes and erotic figures – contain virtually no reference to external events, but strive rather to create a world where beauty, above everything else, is dominant. His use of colour and pattern was profoundly influenced by the art of Japan, ancient Egypt, and Byzantium. Ravenne, the flat, two-dimensional perspective of his paintings, and the frequently stylised quality of his images form an oeuvre imbued with a profound sensuality and one where the figure of woman, above all, reigns supreme. Klimt’s very first works brought him success at an unusually young age. Gustav, born in 1862, obtained a state grant to study at Kunstgewerbeschule (the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts) at the age of fourteen. His talents as a draughtsman and painter were quickly noticed, and in 1879 he formed the Künstlercompagnie (Artists’ Company) with his brother Ernst and another student, Franz Matsch. The latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of great architectural activity in Vienna. In 1857, the Emperor Franz Joseph had ordered the destruction of the fortifications that had surrounded the medieval city centre. The Ringstrasse was the result, a budding new district with magnificent buildings and beautiful parks, all paid for by public expenses. Therefore the young Klimt and his partners had ample opportunities to show off their talents, and they received early commissions to contribute to the decorations for the pageant organised to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elisabeth. In 1894, Matsch moved out of their communal studio, and in 1897 Klimt, together with his closest friends, resigned from the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft (the Cooperative Society of Austrian Artists) to form a new movement known as the Secession, of which he was immediately elected president. The Secession was a great success, holding both a first and second exhibition in 1898. The movement made enough money to commission its very own building, designed for it by the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. Above the entrance was its motto: “To each age its art, to art its freedom.” From around 1897 onward, Klimt spent almost every summer on the Attersee with the Flöge family. These were periods of peace and tranquillity in which he produced the landscape paintings constituting almost a quarter of his entire oeuvre. Klimt made sketches for virtually everything he did. Sometimes there were over a hundred drawings for one painting, each showing a different detail – a piece of clothing or jewellery, or a simple gesture. Just how exceptional Gustav Klimt was is perhaps reflected in the fact that he had no predecessors and no real followers. He admired Rodin and Whistler without slavishly copying them, and was admired in turn by the younger Viennese painters Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, both of whom were greatly influenced by Klimt.

Klimt

A reexamination of the woman who created the legend of Robert Capa, the world's first female photojournalist to die in combat, Gerda Taro In Paris in 1934, a young and beautiful Jewish émigrée, Gerda Pohorylles, met a Hungarian political exile, André Friedmann. They reinvented themselves as the photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa—and he would become the most important photojournalist of his generation. When Gerda was killed in the Spanish Civil war at the age of 26, Robert Capa was her most notable mourner—his grief was beyond control. Her funeral drew crowds of thousands and she became a hero of the political left. Despite the legend that was built around her, she subsequently became a mere footnote in Capa's story. Seventy years after her death a long-lost suitcase was discovered in Mexico, containing thousands of negatives by Capa and Taro. Most astonishingly of all, the "Mexican suitcase" showed that photographs that had been attributed previously to Capa were, in fact, the work of Taro. Jane Rogoyska's book will trace Taro's life and reveal the depth of her relationship with Capa. Charismatic and extraordinary, they epitomized one of the most tumultuous periods of the century.

Jane Rogoyska

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