Opening salvos …

When a man is tired of Johnson, he’s liable to vote for Livingstone. Boris has decided to head Londoners off at the pass by writing a book about them, or rather about 18 of their famed predecessors. From Boudica and Alfred the Great, through Shakespeare and Robert Hooke to Winston Churchill and Keith Richards, we meet people who shaped the city of their birth and/or residence. The stories of both the subjects and the city are brilliantly told. It just so happens that, in passing, we learn such facts as ‘London’s buses are carrying more people than at any time in history’. When Boris visits the Midland Grand Hotel he notes that the traffic outside is ‘flowing smoothly’. By sheer chance one chapter takes a moment to observe that London remains ‘one of the world’s most important centres for these creative culture and media industries’.

The research that has obviously gone into this book might actually have  counted against Johnson at the polls. ‘Shouldn’t he have been running the city rather than reading about it?’ would have been the cry. Boris, as you’d expect of a seasoned London cyclist, swerves skilfully around this danger by acknowledging the help of Stephen Inwood, author of ‘the most readable, thoughtful and interesting one-volume book’ about the capital. The finished product shows an eye for detail that would do Savile Row proud. J.M.W. Turner spoke in a strong Cockney accent. The Tube and the theory of nuclear chain reaction were both invented in London traffic jams. The founder of modern tennis, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, originally wanted a court shaped like an hourglass. A 1631 edition of the King James Bible printed the ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’ commandment without its ‘not’.