Cots and babysitting for children are available.The damageDouble rooms with a courtyard view start at €199 (£142) per night and river-view rooms from €445 (£318), including breakfast.The addressThe Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace, Budapest, Roosevelt ter 5-6, Budapest, Hungary (00 800 6488 6488; www.fourseasons ).. Art fix in Dublin There's life beyond Dublin's enticing pubs - a blossoming artistic heritage, to be celebrated this winter. The Gresham is a short stroll across the Danube from the Royal Palace, which houses the Budapest History Museum, the Hungarian National Gallery and many other attractions. Vaci Utca, Budapest's designer shopping street, is a short walk away.The accessThe hotel has lift access to all floors and two deluxe rooms designed for wheelchair access. Two plush bathrobes are provided, as is a hairdryer and an illuminated vanity mirror.The food and drinkThe Pava restaurant focuses on well-presented and reasonably priced Italian fare, with an impressive list of Hungarian wines. Once, the Gresham Caf?as a focus for the intelligentsia as they talked politics over a bowl of goulash.
Today it serves light interpretations of Hungarian classics, salads, sandwiches and impossibly dainty cakes. Stop by the art nouveau bar for Martinis served in vessels the size of soup bowls.The areaYou're in the fashionable Pest V district. Radio alarm clocks, wide-screen TVs, DVD players and high-speed internet access are provided.The bathroomThe marble bathrooms (with under-floor heating) feature a bath and separate shower, endless mirrors, and as many L'Occitane products as you dare smuggle into your case. The high-ceilinged rooms are simply furnished, with heavy silk curtains, and windows are double-layered so you can gaze out over the Danube blissfully unaware of the traffic below. Behind the hotel is the imposing 19th-century domed Basilica.The comfort factorThe Four Seasons signature Sealy mattresses, Frette linen and down duvets combine to produce a bed plush and voluminous. Those peacock gates open on to the foot of the stately Chain Bridge, facing the Royal Palace If you can, get a river view - spectacular at sunset.
But recent renovations have buffed up the building's sandstone and marble fa?e and restored the cast-iron gates, adorned with giant peacocks, to their former glory. Inside, a glittering mosaic-floored foyer has been created from Venetian Murano glass, with rib-vaulted prism glass ceilings in the arcade, stained-glass windows in the stairwells, marble staircases and art nouveau furniture The location On the Pest bank of the Danube. Built for the British Gresham Life Assurance Company in 1906, it suffered extensive damage during the Second World War and, under Communist rule, fell into disrepair and was used for private apartments and state-run businesses. Dupr? wonderfully succinct explanation of evolutionary theory is a good enough reason in itself to buy this book; however, with the forces of the religious right keen to mount an offensive on these shores, it's the eloquent and uncompromising argument that may prove indispensable.. Possibly one of Budapest's most graceful buildings, the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace opened in 2004 after a four-year, $10m (£5.6m) refit which has restored its art nouveau grandeur. Dupr?hows us how David Hume, Paley's sceptical contemporary, dismissed the argument as pointless - even if it could be established that there was a designer of the universe. Contemporary arguments for intelligent design, for example, are not so different from 18th-century theologian William Paley's classic statement of the teleological argument (argument from design), where he drew an analogy between the complex nature of a watch, with all its parts working towards a central purpose, and the universe Both, he argued, showed evidence of a designer.
