London: An Illustrated Literary Companion

An exquisite time capsule of literary London which takes you on a captivating journey through the city.London: An Illustrated Literary Companion, compiled by Rosemary Gray, captures the varying moods of London over recent centuries, through diary entries, quotations, poems, essays and extracts from great works written in its honour. It is beautifully illustrated with drawings and engravings from distinguished artists, including Gustave Doré, George Cruikshank, James McNeill Whistler and Hugh Thomson, as well as a variety of prints and photographs.Part of the new MCL series of gorgeous pocket-sized travel paperbacks, featuring Treasures of Cornwall, Yorkshire: A Literary Landscape and Paris: A Literary Anthology.

Rosemary Gray is a lifelong London enthusiast, whose career has been in writing, editing and publishing. She has compiled collections of short stories, poems, fairy tales and essays for various publishers, and has created the Everlasting Diary and the Alice in Wonderland Everlasting Diary for the Macmillan Collector’s Library. The gathering together of the material for this illustrated literary companion was a challenging task as so many artists have illustrated parts of the city and so many authors have written about London – many praising, many decrying – but the final presentation has achieved a balance of opinions and comments from a host of the famous and the less famous.