Sophie Gee

Love it, John.

No, that's really... The Orwell shout-out's really important.

And they literally play musical instruments.

I mean, it's hard to overstate the kind of...

Obviously, she couldn't have known that Churchill was going to do that.

But it must have sort of been an issue.

Obviously, it was a huge issue at the time.

So I actually just want to tag onto that with some more of my deep cut history stuff, John, because I'm thinking about this as a novel of London in the immediate aftermath of, well, not immediate, in the kind of slightly belated aftermath of the Second World War.

And I'm thinking about it in relation to Mrs. Dalloway, which, of course, is a novel in the aftermath of the First World War.

where we meet septimus warren smith who is suffering from catastrophic shell shock mrs dalloway who's sort of reflecting on her lost youth and it's this kind of elegy to

an England that has kind of lost its innocence, lost its youth to the first world war.

And the thing I think that's really interesting that both books are using London as a character to think about this enormous national tragedy.

In Wolf's case, London becomes a place where characters who have no connection to one another can actually become kind of psychically, emotionally, and just kind of temporarily connected.

So she, she,

uses Big Ben to draw everybody together into this single experience of being in this city together.

And it brings together, you know, the kind of upper class Mrs. Dalloway with the lower class, deeply suffering Septimus Smith.

Allingham in Tiger in the Smoke uses the same character of London to

to emphasize the brokenness, the kind of lack of community.

I mean, she's got this band of petty criminals, which is interesting.

But it's a city where there's complete anonymity and complete sort of loss of identity.