London: A Literary Companion

There is no city more talked about, or written about, than London. Each district, each landmark has literary associations hardly separable from the stones themselves. Some of them are well known, even hackneyed. Here you can see suburbia through the eyes of P.G. Wodehouse, or blitzed ruins through those of Rose Macaulay, or Hampstead society through Ezra Pound's. Max Beerbohm can introduce you to the goat that used to live in Piccadilly, and Victor Hugo to Charles II's watchman, whose job was to crow like a cock. You can watch G.B. Shaw dance in Fitzroy Square, with a chorus line of policemen, and see G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc ride donkeys into the Ritz. Here you can see Dr Johnson perform a citizen's arrest, observe Marx extracting money from Engels, watch E.M. Forster help E. Nesbit set fire to models of surburban villas, and learn about Queen Victoria's liking for nudes.;This book is a delightful celebration of London in all its moods, of royal London, commercial London, criminal London, the crowds, the river, even the fog - all of them given immediacy and life by writers as diverse as Samuel Pepys and Martin Amis, Thackeray and V.S. Pritchett.