If walls could talk

Is it possible to take on the genius or character of those who have slept in your bed before? Steven King stays in homes with illustrious past owners to find out

- Steven King

WHY should we be (and generally speaking we are) so keen on visiting or (better still) staying in places that belong or once belonged to rich, famous, brilliant or otherwise distinguished people? It's an interesting question and potentially a slightly awkward one, too, concerning as it does an apparently irresistible urge to cosy up to genius, or, if not genius, then at least some kind of exceptional glamour-or, failing that, plain old money.

Plenty of us will book a hotel because (let's say) 'this was where Napoleon preferred to stay when relaxing in St Helena' or 'Marianne North was living here in the 1890s when she did her marvellous paintings of the coco de mer and other extraordinary flora of the Seychelles'.

I've made reservations on roughly that basis.

On one occasion, to my lasting regret, I dragged my wife to the (admittedly perfectly pleasant) suite of rooms in which Véra and Vladimir Nabokov lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel for 15 years or so following the success of Lolita and where the increasingly irascible old mandarin wrote a handful of late, difficult masterpieces. Pieces of the Nabokovs' own furniture, including a lectern at which he stood to write, were still in place and the layout of the rooms remained unchanged. Why regret, then? I'm not sure. Perhaps because my wife never shared my enthusiasm for his novels.

Although she did understand the convenient-for-hunting-Alpine-butterflies element-which was, after all, the main reason why the Nabokovs moved to Montreux. In a way, her appreciation of that fact justified our visit more convincingly than did my own foolish, bookish fancies.

Literature may be a common gateway drug in this respect, although it's not the only one.