London - Peter Vansittart

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 look on as Shaw dances in Fitzroy Square with a chorus line of policemen, and G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc ride donkeys into the Ritz. Here you can see Dr Johnson perform a citizen's arrest, or Marx touch Engels for money. You can watch E.M. Forster help E. Nesbit set fire to models of suburban villas, and learn about Queen Victoria's liking for nudes.;This book is a 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.