How intriguing to find a temple to Mithras resting underneath a temple to Mammon. Having visited the Guildhall amphitheatre and the nearby remains of Roman walls the other day, I have got the taste for seeking out Roman London. And so to the Bloomberg building in Walbrook (once a river, now a road) in theRead More
A grey but mild day. The rain has gone. There are a few things to seek out in London this Sunday, so I shall set out for a walk around the city. Train journey, reading Christoph Ransmayr’s novel The Dog King. Ransmayr is my great literary discovery of these past few months, but the novelRead More
It is good to explore a river. One can proceed upstream, in search of a source whose precise location might never be determined. Or one can follow the river downstream until it widens out upon reaching the sea, the exact point on the map at which the one turns into the other being equally beyondRead More
The Bridge. It’s a good name for a theatre. It makes you think of those plain, bold, striking names given to London’s theatres in Shakespeare’s time: The Globe, The Rose, The Swan, The Theatre. They were located (most of them) on the southern bank of the Thames, and likewise The Bridge, which sits on theRead More
120. I remember directions marked out in pink wherever you went. 121. I remember Nicola Adams’ smile. 122. I remember the radio-controlled cars which were used to retrieve javelins and shots. 123. I remember the Olympic posters designed by various celebrated artists, and how poor most of them were, showing how very little said artistsRead More
A perpetual buzz of conversation mingled with the crackle of peanut shells that littered the floor like snow in winter. Every step in any direction crunched … Nearby, children were reading the titles out loud for the benefit of their foreign parents. Some even translated the words directly into Yiddish. Babies cried, kids were slapped,Read More
Pandaemonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660. It will never be finished – it has to be transformed into Jerusalem. The building of Pandaemonium is the real history of Britain for the last three hundred years. Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer behind ‘Isles of Wonder’, the extraordinary and widely acclaimedRead More