Abstract

MICHAEL HEBBERT Introduction A properly comprehensive list of writing on modem London published in the twenty years since the launch of the London Journal might surpass the two thousand entries in the bibliography compiled by Philippa Dolphin, Eric Grant and Edward Lewis in 1981 (4.4). The literature is enormous, and much of it lies in specialist journals or books whose Library of Congress and British Library cataloguing keywords offer little clue to their London dimension. As ever, the metropolis continues to attract a more than proportionate share of journalistic, academic and literary attention. So, this review must be selective. To keep the bibliography to manageable proportions we have focussed on books with a Lon- don subject classification, and 'academic' rather than 'trade' titles. That excludes scores of valu- able research papers in academic journals and all the delightful, affectionate works of homage to the highways and byways of the metropolis which distract shelf-browsers from more serious business in the Guildhall Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. The list could be even more drastically shrunk if it included only the books on post-1939 London reviewed in the twenty volumes of the London Journal. In the matter of London Past versus London