Richard Boston
A City Built On Bones
Necropolis: London and its Dead
By Catharine Arnold
Simon & Schuster 304pp £14.99
It was Petronius (my dictionary of quotations informs me) who used ‘the majority’ as a euphemism for the dead. Perhaps, then, President Nixon was making an uncharacteristic joke when he spoke of the silent majority that supported him. Be that as it may, however enormous the number of people who live in London, they are outnumbered by those who have died there. T S Eliot in The Waste Land cleverly merges the city’s living and dead populations by borrowing from Dante’s Inferno:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
The first section of Eliot’s poem is called ‘The Burial of the Dead’, an echo of which can be heard in the subtitle of Catharine Arnold’s Necropolis. London, she says, is one giant grave, and her declared intention is to examine how London has coped with its dead from prehistoric
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘The Second World War was won in Oxford. Discuss.’
@RankinNick gives the question his best shot.
Nicholas Rankin - We Shall Fight in the Buttery
Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson
literaryreview.co.uk
For the first time, all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving prose, a massive body of stories, articles, reviews and letters, has been gathered together in a single volume.
@FionaRSampson sifts it for evidence of how the young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.
Fiona Sampson - Changed in a Minute
Fiona Sampson: Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruling class has lost its sprezzatura.
On porky rolodexes and the persistence of elite reproduction, for the @Lit_Review: