The author of the book, Caroline Dawnay, is a top literary agent. In September, when The Times published a chart of literary agents, linking them to authors and each other, Dawnay figured as the agent of Nick Hornby. She has subsequently been much in the news because of volcanic upheavals in the world of agents. The blurb of the Aunts book assures us that Mungo McCosh’s name is not invented and that he lives in Scotland — which is why, no doubt, the ‘Gallivant’ illustration shows kilted dancers, possibly performing an eightsome reel.
London above Eye Level (Frances Lincoln, £9.99) is another charming, mainly pictorial book. As it measures only six inches by four inches by half an inch, it is the ideal stocking-filler. Its author is John R. Murray, who until 2002 was the last of that family to run the publishing firm of John Murray, founded in 1768, which published Byron, Jane Austen, Darwin and Betjeman from exquisite 1812 offices in Albemarle Street, London. It was Betjeman who urged the young John Murray VII (and all the rest of us, on television) to look at the upper storeys of buildings — above eye level, above the ground floor, so often ruined by modern shops and other excrescences.
For this book, Murray has done just that. The photographs show a fascinating succession of architectural details — indeed, the book might have been given the conservationist title Spare Us the Details. You could conscript the book for a Christmas-party quiz, for Murray has put all the picture captions at the end, giving us the chance to identify the sights and sites from the photographs alone. He did not need to stir from Albemarle Street to illustrate the Belle Epoque entrance to Royal Arcade, with its icing-sugar decoration in pink and white by Archer & Green (1879–80). I wonder how many readers will recognise the trumpeting stone elephant on page 81. Everyone, of course, will find some of his own favourite details omitted. I would have put in the giant snail on the façade of L’Escargot restaurant in Soho. Was it, perhaps, made in Paris and brought to London — a Snail of Two Cities? (And yes, I am familiar with the apocryphal Spoonerism about the auction of a bust of the naked Pauline Borghese — A Sale of Two Titties.)
Comments
Anna
December 18th, 2007 9:23amSeriously, do you really think that you British are well dressed, know what good food is(maybe you have learnt it last week on television), and that your drinking habits are acceptable? It is way too easy to loose yourselves in the mean French VS the good English battle. I break you the news: all Europeans think exactly like Madame Mont Paisir when it comes to the English. She reads our minds and knows what we talk about at dinner parties!! Well done Sarah Long!
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