Most times it’s hard to match, let alone top, an early success. Just ask those producers of movie series who tried to follow up hits like Rambo or The Exorcist. The same thing applies to literature. “It is the fate of sequels to disappoint those who have waited for them,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in the dedication to Catriona. He feared that the hero of Kidnapped, David Balfour, had been left to kick his heels too long, and “must expect his late re-appearance to be greeted with hoots, if not with missiles.” Biographers occasionally struggle with the same problem. Irvin Ehrenpreis wrote two brilliant volumes for his thee-part life of Jonathan Swift, but seems to have lost interest when he neared the end-zone, while J. H. Plumb simply gave up on his masterly account of Robert Walpole after he got within thirty yards of the line. Jerry White faced a similar prospect when he decided to add a clincher to his much-praised books on London in the twentieth century (2001) and in the nineteenth century (2007). The Hanoverian age had not previously been his home turf, and he may have dreaded some of the hoots that Stevenson anticipated. But, unlike Catriona, White’s London III fully lives up to what has gone before.1No call for the missiles:
