The title is from an article on The Spectator authored by Sinclair McKay (I am feeling silly obsessing about the coincidental clash of name/surname).
Very few authors have fashioned a London more real than the one we see: Dickens, Conan Doyle, Patrick Hamilton, Angela Carter. Sinclair is firmly among them. While his contemporary Peter Ackroyd understands London as a city of eternally recurring patterns and echoes, Sinclair sees something more malign and gangrenous: forces that endlessly conspire to bend perception and bleach the streets of their real meaning.
Reading this article was also a great opportunity to learn a new word (“curmudgeonly“) which I will never be able to pronounce (that’s actually not the only thing I have learned from this article).
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