Flicker … whirr … Move it along, Granddad, you’re getting in
the way of The Scene! The London Scene, that is! From Soho to
Notting Hill, from Camberwell to Camden Town, the capital city of
Dear Old Blighty pulses anew with the good vibrations of an
epic-scale youthquake!

—Vanity Fair,
March 1997

I first settled in London in 1950 at a time when the rubble left
over from the Blitz was still in evidence here and there. Food and
clothing rationing were still intact. Dowdiness was the rule. But
the admirable new National Health Service was working to just about
everybody’s satisfaction, and I never once encountered a beggar on
the streets. In 1957, along came the Suez crisis. I attended a
protest rally in Trafalgar Square and joined the march on Downing
Street. A French Communist had instructed us in how to cope with
the police on horseback, the so-called “Whitehall Cossacks.” He
said, “You throw marbles under the horses’ feet. They slip and fall.
They break their legs.”

An indignant British comrade protested, “But we couldn’t do that.
It would be cruelty to animals.”

So I liked it here. The book pages in the Sunday broadsheets were
a joy: Cyril Connolly in The Sunday Times, Nigel Dennis in The
Sunday Telegraph, and Philip Toynbee in
The Observer.
The parliamentary debates were exhilarating. One day, during the
Suez crisis, Nye Bevan was savaging poor Selwyn Lloyd, then foreign