London A-Z (and back again)

The bald lesson of the abbey’s memorials is that money, power and connections repeatedly trump virtue and talent. So what to do with all these imperfect manifestations of wealth and inequality? Weed out the undeserving? Remove them all to the equivalent of a Soviet statue graveyard? There were at least four plans to do just that in the 1800s. But it’s hardly necessary.

The scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister Crowley’s system of ceremonial magick that seemed to go beyond the standard, kitschy rock star flirtation with the ‘dark side’ into a genuine research project.

At the point when we bought our house in 1996, average house prices in the UK, adjusted for inflation, were some way below the levels they’d hit in the late 1980s bubble. Clapham was then...

‘You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’

In​ 1972, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson completed Robin Hood Gardens, their only council estate. The couple were famous for projects such as the Mies van der Rohe-inspired Hunstanton...

Samuel Pepys was the son of a London tailor and a president of the Royal Society. He was a philanderer who could feed a wench lobster before having his way with her under a chair in a tavern...

The Greater London Council was set up by the Conservative Government in 1963 because the old London County Council was redistributing wealth of every kind from the London rich to the London...

London was a city that loved to snack: a Venetian visitor wrote in 1618 that ‘between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats.’ But while buying from hawkers could be a source of treats to leaven a relatively boring diet, it could also be good household management.

The Owl Man represented raw nature against the pasteurised alternative: traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s Wagnerian lightshow.

Admiration is defined by Johnson in that Dictionary as ‘taken sometimes in a bad sense, though generally in a good’, and he was, for the greater part of his life, a great engine of self-admiration, as well as a copious begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a wondrous act of worship and a curious kind of self-loving.

Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable...

Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen...

Do we need another biography of Marx to go alongside the many we already have? The justification given by Jonathan Sperber is compelling. Previous accounts of Marx’s life have gone one of...

The poet​ Linton Kwesi Johnson calls the first two generations of Caribbean people in postwar Britain the ‘heroic’ generation and the ‘rebel’ generation. The Windrush...

For British nationalists and imperialists, it has always been uncomfortable to think of Roman London as a medium-sized provincial capital on the periphery of someone else’s empire. It’s even worse to think of it as dependent on state subsidies from a Roman (read: European) superpower; or to face up to the city’s decline in the fifth century following the dissolution of imperial infrastructure and the final withdrawal of troops to the Continent – a kind of enforced Brexit.