So London remains my cage, the door is open, but I cannot leave. Meanwhile, the cage is comfortable enough… — Laurie Lee

Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don't know the pleasure of being hungry any more.

Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing she said, the need to see her to have life confirmed.

Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together in one place.  Here, in a day, you can see the world.  Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during the rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past.  One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.