JudithKDPeter Bushell - London's Secret History
Mad dogs and Englishmen? Well, Mad Englishmen anyway. Bushell is a former tour guide, so he knows London inside & out. But the stories are really short. Makes me want to take the book and walk thru London with it.
There’s so much here I hesitate to TRY and pick something. Okay. I’ve got it. I’ll close my eyes and type a number on my keypad then get an excerpt from that page.
64
Page 64 it is . . .
“In 1903 another writer, G. K Chesterton, spent his last ten shillings on a large meal and a bottle of wine at the Cheshire Cheese. he did so to boost his morale before canvassing a publisher for a 20 pound advance on a book he proposed to write. ‘What a fool a man is when he comes to the last ditch, not to tspend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to fight a battle with wits’”
Again: 105
“On the western side of the Square [Parliment Square] is a statue to Abraham Lincoln, unveiled in 1920 by a man with the unlikely name of Elihu Root. The gift of the American people, it is a copy of a statue in Lincoln Park, Chicago. (Osbert Sitwell felt we might suitably revenge ourselves on the American people by sending some surplus-to-requirements statue of Queen Victoria for erection in Lincoln Park.)”
etc.
People fascinate me, and here it is, page after page of absurd, silly, touching, and nasty stuff people have done to themselves and each other through the centuries in London. For someone from SoCal, it reminds me again of how much human history there is, while also reminding me how little different we are from our past.
Amusing and entertaining while thought provoking!
jkd 12 months ago
