Archive - John Vane: London Stories

Nervousness on WhatsApp Street

A London neighbourhood watches and wonders about strangers seeking favours at its front doors after dark

Jan 6 •

December 2024

London fiction: Mission accomplished

Some were enormous novels, some were short stories and they all shed their own light on the city, its people and its changing times

Dec 31, 2024 •

London fiction - The Diary of a Nobody

George and Weedon Grossmith captured the struggles of a particular class of Victorian to retain respectability amid the constant assaults of vulgarity

Dec 28, 2024 •

London fiction - Rosie Hogarth

Alexander Baron's novel captures the conservatism and the discontents of post-war working-class Islington

Dec 23, 2024 •

London fiction - Vine Street

Dominic Nolan's crime novel explores in fine detail the Soho of the 1930s

Dec 10, 2024 •

Comic turns, Camden

Jokes about dating, ethnicity and meditation and one routine that went too far

Dec 1, 2024 •

November 2024

October 2024

London Fiction - The Bodyguards

Esther Freud's short story draws with skilful economy the relationship between two women having man troubles and their relationships with the city

Oct 27, 2024 •

London Fiction – The Smoke

Tom Barling's big, fat 1986 gangland crime novel is vividly written, pretty gruelling and captures a slice of 1960s London that wasn't one bit pretty

Oct 15, 2024 •

London Fiction – A Bear Called Paddington

Reading the very first Michael Bond's stories about one of the treasures of children's fiction all the way through brings home the context in which he…

Oct 1, 2024 •

September 2024

London Fiction – The Adventure of the Cheap Flat

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot short story from the 1920s reveals, among other things, that flat-hunting in the capital has never been straightforward

Sep 25, 2024 •

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