Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream,...

What an amazing thing is the coming of spring to London. The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you...

Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable

I was always told at school I was posh, then I came to London, and here I’m told I have a country accent.

I miss London on nights in June or in October.

I’m always afraid someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, ‘Back to North London.’

The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.

I escaped London in 1997 because it was hard to raise capital.

Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I’ve fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am...

No, the events which I am about to describe were simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print. They still are. It is no exaggeration to suggest that they would tear apart the entire...

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn’t) ‘if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”,...

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn’t necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still...

Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and...

Pleasantly bustling shoppers streamed past us on Bond Street – smart-suited men and well-heeled women whose commitment to luxury goods glazed over their eyes like a bad case of malaria.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can...

Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in mine, and I’ll be happy for the rest of my fucked up little life.

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There’s no natural light in this pub, so it’s dark and gloomy. The...

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held...

Is Dust immortal then, I ask’d him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is...

They called him because they were doing a segment on Eric on some kids show in London. They set it up so this American high school coach would come over and evaluate whether this British...

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.

I trained as an actor in London and went to Mountview Conservatory, as it was called then, and lived there for eleven years.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds...

It’s a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this.”I thought he was joking, for the view...

And I’ll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people,...

The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down...

This is England,” he explained. “Tell someone it’s a procedure, and they’ll believe you. The pointless procedure is one of our great natural resources.

The Duke is worried you lack the fitness to walk up Bond Street. You’re generation lacks the drive.

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn’t be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to...

Winter has arrived in North London. Snow has settled. The white snow looks beautiful and covers everything my eyes can see, yet beneath the incomprehensible beauty, the snow freezes greenery which struggles to breathe. Green...

Nowadays, people resort to all kinds of activities in order to calm themselves after a stressful event: performing yoga poses in a sauna, leaping off bridges while tied to a bungee, killing imaginary zombies with...

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have...

Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It’s the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom…

He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up.

The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul’s,...

There’s this idea that it has to be made in London. But we’ve got everything up here, and if you’ve got comics who are gifted because of where they’re from, you shouldn’t drag them away...

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don’t want some poor Indian girl’s hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people...

How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It...

I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as ‘Abu Nidal’ (‘father of struggle’), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat’s main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when...

I lived in London for eight years and I like to say that I am two parts American and one part British because I lived there for a third of my life.

I don’t know if there is actually more rain here in England, or if it was just that the rain seemed to be so deliberately annoying. Every drop hit the window with a peevish “Am...

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful...

In their final testament, the heroic brothers in the London attacks provided great lessons to the Islamic nation and Muslims in Pakistan to oppose the infidels.

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme,...

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others. Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn’t unlike any other major city – New York or Paris or Sydney – but he felt instinctively...

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters,...