LONDON PERCEIVED

A companion volume to Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence this is again a splendid collaboration and an exceptionally expressive documentary of ""the least nervous city in the world"". Pritchett's profile is sensitive to the temper and tone of London -its ""weighty permanence"", confused public aspects, abiding respectability and sense of property- privacy and privilege. His vistas of the past, when- until the 19th century, a ""world of classical certainties and orthodoxy"" was created, of the present-when since the war London has become more tolerant and cosmopolitan in character, of its external world of gardens, markets, docks, streets and buildings, and its well-guarded inner life, is all accomplished in the mobile continuity of impressions and insights.