History of a Pleasure Seeker

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to all those who helped me to imagine and write History of a Pleasure Seeker. I first told the story to Pieter Swinkels and Jolanda van Dijk, of De Bezige Bij, and later to my wonderful Dutch editor Peter van der Zwag. The Fonds voor de Letteren and the NLPVF made possible an extended stay in Amsterdam, where Bert Vreeken and the staff of the Willet-Holthuysen Museum were extremely generous with their knowledge and time. My Dutch researcher Irene Lannoye worked tirelessly translating documents and advising on names and other details; without her this book would have taken ten years longer to write. I am grateful, too, to William H. Miller Jr. for his superb work on ocean liners, Brian Fernandes, Marianne Schonbach, Fleur van Koppen, the Van Loon Museum, the Goethe Institute Amsterdam, the Athenaeum Bookshop, Daniel Viehoff, Pieter Rouwendal, Harriet Sergeant, Anne-Catherine Gillet, Will Hartman, Nancy Herralda, Andrea Wulf, Michael Bawtree, Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Lyle Saunders, Annika Ebrahim, Anne-Marie Bodal, Fanny Adler, Peter Adler, Ian Ross, George Shilling, Victoria Wilson, Irène Némirovsky, Kirsty Dunseath, Kathleen Anderson, Patrick Walsh, Jane and Tony Mason, Benjamin Morse, the staff of the National Library of South Africa and the Mount Nelson Hotel, Cape Town — and, of course, to Fryderyk Chopin, J. S. Bach, Georges Bizet and Coco Chanel.