Reading the excellent Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude - published in 1947 and set during WWII. A long lifetime away, but anyone who commutes into our capital today will surely think that the opening two paragraphs could have been written about yesterday or tomorrow:
London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.
The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.
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