William Shakespeare wrote somewhere between 37 and 39 plays. Scholars still debate the exact number, and at least one play (Cardenio) is considered lost entirely. He also wrote 154 sonnets and several longer poems. He did all of this between roughly 1590 and 1613, which is the kind of output…
My grandfather was a Dickens man. Every novel on the shelf, read and re-read, spines cracked, pages slightly yellowed. And all of it available to me from a very young age. Which is how I ended up having finished the complete works before I turned ten. Not a reading plan…
If you’ve read anything on this site, you already know how I feel about Sherlock Holmes. He is, in my entirely unbiased opinion, the most London thing to have ever not existed. And the fact that he didn’t exist has never really stopped him from feeling completely real. The canon…
If you’ve spent any time on this site you’ll already know that London is deeply embedded in the Harry Potter universe: King’s Cross, Leadenhall Market as Diagon Alley, the Millennium Bridge (which I still refuse to cross, and if you know you know). But before you go looking for the…
Being a Sherlock Holmes fan is unlike belonging to any other fandom. Because Holmes didn’t just exist in stories. He, to this day, exists in this city, on streets that are still here, in buildings that are still standing, in a London that you can still, if you look at…
For the late-night Etsy browsers. You know who you are. There’s a whole economy out here for people who love reading as an entire personality, — the bags, the wall art, the advent calendars, the vases shaped like classic novels. And honestly? It’s brilliant. This is my curation of the…
There are a lot of “London’s best bookshops” lists out there. Most of them cover the same five shops in the same order with the same photograph of Daunt Books’ reading room. So here’s a slightly different take: not just which bookshops are worth your time, but why, and more…
London has always been a city that reads. London has always been a city that reads. You don’t have to go looking for bookish London. It finds you; in the pub name you walk past every morning, in the square you cut through on the way to the tube, in…