London’s Brutal Underground | Mark O’Connell
Viewed from certain perspectives—the perspective of history, the perspective of the roughly one quarter of the world that was once colonized by Britain—London is a metropolis built on crime. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most beautiful and culturally vital cities in the world, but the grandeur of its architecture, the splendor of its museums and galleries and cultural institutions, was purchased with the proceeds of centuries of thievery and murder. As someone whose own country, Ireland, was the first of those plundered by and ruled from London, I find it impossible to encounter Walter Benjamin’s famous assertion that “there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism” without seeing its ultimate proof in the empire’s former capital. The American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who himself has roots in County Donegal—and whose most celebrated book, Say Nothing (2019), is concerned with the Troubles in Northern Ireland—is highly attuned to this aspect of the city. About three quarters of the way through his new book, London Falling, he …
