I'm so pleased to hear that about Aaronovitch! He definitely reads as someone who's done a lot of thinking and research. His use of Roman history gets really interesting in the later books - all the more interesting to me since Roman Britain never really featured much in my studies, so he's taught me a bunch of new things!
That's also really interesting about London and the response it provokes in writers. As an Australian, the entire Old World has a sort of otherworldly magic about it - of course our continent has a very ancient history, but colonisation was recent, so our civic institutions and buildings and so forth are all quite young and don't have anything like the mystique and historical layering of a city like London. The one time I saw a crime/thriller series set in our capital city, I honestly thought it was a bit of a joke. Cultural cringe is big here. We tend to share an unspoken feeling that our cities, while great to live in, aren't really worth making art about.
But I adored London the one time I visited (at age sixteen, I believe) and these books have thoroughly reignited my desire to come back.
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Date: 2024-12-26 12:43 am (UTC)That's also really interesting about London and the response it provokes in writers. As an Australian, the entire Old World has a sort of otherworldly magic about it - of course our continent has a very ancient history, but colonisation was recent, so our civic institutions and buildings and so forth are all quite young and don't have anything like the mystique and historical layering of a city like London. The one time I saw a crime/thriller series set in our capital city, I honestly thought it was a bit of a joke. Cultural cringe is big here. We tend to share an unspoken feeling that our cities, while great to live in, aren't really worth making art about.
But I adored London the one time I visited (at age sixteen, I believe) and these books have thoroughly reignited my desire to come back.