Among the saddest sights in half-empty London are its theatres. Walk along Shaftesbury Avenue and adjoining streets, and there is theatre after theatre advertising empty shows. The Victorian and Edwardian grand buildings, with their stony solidity, graced with sculptural curlicues and busts of Shakespeare, proudly bearing the names of theatrical greats, squeezed tightly into theRead More
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