John Hillaby's London

Fülszöveg

In just over half a century Britain's best-known literary pedestrian has walked more than five times the equivalent of the equatorial girth of the world: through boreal Canada; the length of Britain; over the central African Mountains of the Moon; from the Netherlands to Nice by way of the Alps; to Lake Rudolf and back in the deserts of north Kenya; in Appalachia; and from Athens to Macedonia. Now John Hillaby's London describes vividly how a globe-trotter can extract the ultimate in urban walking, for in his view the small streets of large cities are as ripe for exploration as the road to Samarkand or Samarra.
Here is no guidebook stuff, no changing of the guard or the view from Tower Bridge. But he does disclose, probably for the first time, what happened to the genital apparatus of classical statues removed at the express wish of Queen Victoria and replaced by fig-leaves. He has kept his pocket tape-recorder running in cab-drivers' shelters, in Annie's Bar at the House of... Tovább

Fülszöveg

In just over half a century Britain's best-known literary pedestrian has walked more than five times the equivalent of the equatorial girth of the world: through boreal Canada; the length of Britain; over the central African Mountains of the Moon; from the Netherlands to Nice by way of the Alps; to Lake Rudolf and back in the deserts of north Kenya; in Appalachia; and from Athens to Macedonia. Now John Hillaby's London describes vividly how a globe-trotter can extract the ultimate in urban walking, for in his view the small streets of large cities are as ripe for exploration as the road to Samarkand or Samarra.
Here is no guidebook stuff, no changing of the guard or the view from Tower Bridge. But he does disclose, probably for the first time, what happened to the genital apparatus of classical statues removed at the express wish of Queen Victoria and replaced by fig-leaves. He has kept his pocket tape-recorder running in cab-drivers' shelters, in Annie's Bar at the House of Commons, in Soho at two in the morning, among the down-and-outs sleeping on the Embankment, and in other places overlooked by most of London's perambulators.
In addition to those seemingly tireless feet and his inexhaustible curiosity, John Hillaby's expertise lies in his training as a scientific correspondent for the Guardian and the New York Times, and as a columnist for the New Scientist. He reports the discovery of rare creatures in the huge gardens of Buckingham Palace, a colony of Britain's biggest spiders in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, and muses about the inhabitants of Hampstead Heath when the Thames flowed across what is now Heathrow airport.
For day after day he has walked the diameters of Milton's 'dear, damned distracting town', and he records his discoveries and observations about its buildings, its people, its flora and fauna (from the ferocious wild cats behind St Paul's to the gentle deer of Hampton Court) in prose which has about it the ring of a poet.
There has never been a book about London quite like this one. Vissza