Cornflower quotes Iris Murdoch on London in the summer, and reminds me of two or three wonderful passages about London from favourite authors of mine.
First, Powell in Temporary Kings:
How unchanged remains the French view of English life - phlegmatic, sadistic aristocrats, moving coldly and silently from one atrocity to another through the fogs of le Hyde Park and les Jardins de Kensington.
Then T S Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And then, the magnificent Lugg in Margery Allingham's Tiger In The Smoke:
The fog was now at its worst, rolling up from the river dense as a featherbed. It hung between street lamp and street lamp in blinding and abominable folds ... [whilst driving the car] Lugg manoeuvred into Park Lane and sat on the tail of a late bus for Victoria. "I could do with with a spot of p and q in a padded cell myself. That was Marble Arch I was 'ootin' at. I thought she was taking her time."
By the way, the title comes from the nickname of the thick, choking fogs of coal-burning London - "a London peculiar".
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