Atmospheric history …

… The American Scholar: Whores de Combat - Charles Trueheart. (Hat tip, Susan Dundon.)

Of the actual Hotel Florida in Madrid, “a ten-story marble-clad jewel box” a bit down on its heels and favored by “a polyglot collection of journalists, French and Russian pilots, and opportunistic ladies of the evening,” Hemingway said, with characteristic grandiosity, “You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could learn anywhere in the world.”