Thumbs up for Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City
A small, charming book that is exactly as the subtitle says: a look at the old-fashioned London of fiction, and how that image overlaps (and doesn’t) with the real London of today. Well-written and thoroughly enjoyable – even if my personal imaginary London is the London of imported cop shows, rather than the city of Dickens and Galsworthy that Quindlen grew up with.
The room was extremely small, exactly the sort of snug and vaguely uncomfortable place in which people who do not write imagine writers writing. If she had tried to write there, it would have had to be on the bed, which took up most of the available space. There was a bathroom shoehorned into one corner of the room – or was it more properly called a loo? Or just the bath, in the fashion of the Mitford sisters? – with a toilet in which, she could not help feeling every time she looked at it, shamefaced at being so obviously American, there was far too little water. The electrical sockets looked highly unfamiliar, and again there was that thump from within. She had purchased an adapter! She could convert the current!
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