Mwhahaha. The Book Grocer rubs her hands together greedily as she contemplates the week ahead. Festival season kicks off this week, and its offerings may be summarised with one word: excellent. Tuesday: VS Naipaul fans will want to head to Daunt Books tonight to hear Patrick French and AN Wilson discuss French’s recent biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, The World Is What It Is, heralded as a “magnificent achievement” (7pm, £5). Also on:......

Diaries out, bibliophiles. Festival season is almost upon us. No, not the festival season that will have you rolling around in mud or throwing your pants at the stage (well, you could throw your pants at the stage, and we’d certainly provide moral support for that endeavour). We’re talking literary festival season – Christmas in July for the book geeks among us. Let’s start with the little guy first. London Lit Plus launched just......

June’s here, and we’re feeling a bit slack. But although the summer blockbusters have rolled into town to lessen the load on our addled brains, literary London keeps on cranking out the heavyweights. Lightweight summer reading? Not here, not yet. Tuesday: You might have inferred that we love London. We do, we really do. Which places us in the company of many a great poet: Wordsworth, Blake, Lawrence. Poems by these and plenty of......

Yet another reason our love runs deep for literary London: this happy little subculture is as diverse as the city itself. On offer this week is an eclectic mixture ranging from an Asian literature festival, to a panel discussion of the utility of creative writing courses, to a talk with a well-known American memoirist. As always, the difficulty is in choosing which events we just can’t bear to miss. Monday: Blame last week’s summer-like......

We began this week with a great big gaping void: the very excellent London Word Festival has come to an end (though you can watch highlights here), and our nearly 40-day-long combination chocolate and carbon dioxide fast has left us, well, a bit snippy (we’ll certainly be biting the heads off those cloyingly cute Lindt bunnies come this weekend). In short, we didn’t have great expectations for the week. Yet, after taking a look......

The year was 1959, and in an often overlooked corner of Hackney, one of the world's most recognisable Hollywood beauties was bringing just a touch of Californian colour to a peculiarly English affair: a budgie show. Jayne Mansfield, living in London while making the film Too Hot To Handle, was invited to the All Saints church in Haggerston in September 1959 to help judge the East London Budgerigar and Foreign Birds Society show. Michael......

As part of a multi-billion pound investment programme, the cross-city Thameslink line is to get a brand new fleet of trains. Southern Railway, who will be operating the new stock when it comes into service next spring, will deploy 44 carriages to run northwards to Bedford instead of terminating in Blackfriars as they presently do. Good news for commuters who do the daily yo-yo up and down Thameslink's fifty-odd station route. However, we were......

It's officially Spring and by Pisces it's lovely out there in the sunshine. Crocuses have been spotted in Highbury Fields so our biggest recommendation for expenditure light trips this week is get to the parks and into the gardens and witness the miracles of the changing seasons. If you're in need of more artificial stimulation, however, and are squirrelling all your spare cash into your ISA before the end of the tax year then......

Happy February, FOBGs. Another healthy serving of book groceries awaits you this week. Stick to a well-rounded book diet, and you’re sure to stave off a winter cold. We have no actual data to support this contention – we’re book geeks, not science nerds – but it certainly sounds promising. So eat your greens, drink your grains, and check back later this week for a bonus edition of the Book Grocer especially dedicated to......

The Olympic Park has received a lot of attention lately, unveiling its flagship stadium, promising to start work on it early and suffering fiery blazes which fortuitously destroyed a warehouse due for demolition. This Saturday though, an audaciously different kind of attention will be focused on the Stratford site: imagining the Olympics weren't happening. WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD is an artistic collaboration exploring what the Olympic site means to people and endeavouring......

We can't think of anything more scary for Hallowe'en than Hawksmoor's brooding masterpiece of Christ Church, Spitalfields, spreading out its talons, poised to strike. The church has often been linked to the occult and mysterious - most notably in Alan Moore's 'From Hell' and the work of Iain Sinclair. Keep sending in your own images of distorted London to londonist - at - gmail - dot - com......

London’s got its very own comics festival, and it’s kicking off this weekend. But don’t let yourself envisage flocks of overgrown adolescents in ill-fitting capes – Comica’s appeal is that it casts its eye more broadly, bringing in arresting art and affecting stories from around the world. Normally it’s the heroes in tights hogging the spotlight. Comica gets them to step aside for a couple of weeks a year in favour of the unusual......

Just out the Van: The London Literature Festival, a two week Festival, starts today at the South Bank Centre. Some of the highlights over the weekend and next week include: Sat 30 June - The Uk's biggest ever Book Crossing (free). Mon 2 July - Pat Barker launches her new novel, Life Class, with a reading and discussion about her life as a writer in her only London show (£8.50). Tues 3 July -......

Ok, we've had a good cry in the corner and kicked as many shins as possible over this, but time now to take a deep breath and finally get over not being nominated for a Bloggie this year. Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Iain Sinclair and Black Sabbath didn't get nominated either so we're in good company (shut up, this is our way of dealing with it). Anyway - we are still very happy to......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways 21. Cecil Court Where? Short pedestrian route between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. What? In the heart of glitzy, neon tourist-town, it's heartening to find such a contrasting bastion of antiquity. The shop fronts have not, we're told, been altered in more than a century. All of which made this the perfect location for filming recent period piece 'Miss Potter'. The Victorian frontages belie......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Tonight It isn't Christmas without a Dickensian orphan boy made good, and here we have a discussion about the two greatest; Oliver Twist (did anyone see the Polanski film [pictured]?) and Pip from Great Expectations. 6.30 - 8pm, £6/£4, the British Library, Conference Centre, St Pancras. Celebrate the launch of Strange Attractor Journal Three......

There's not much more to say about the weekend ahead except... "Whoosh! Whee! Bang! fffsssssssssstttttt....POW!" It's Bonfire Night so London is going to be quite preoccupied with either getting as close as possible to some pyrotechnic displays or heading for the hills far away from the fireworks. In case you need any other distractions between now and Monday, here's a slightly truncated Culture Crawl for those who would rather get their thrills from non-exploding......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Wednesday Based on his columns for McSweeny's, Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree seems rather a lazy excuse for a "meta" book. Hornby (pictured) explores books - what he buys, what he reads and what he doesn't. Oh well, the man's gotta eat - join the polysyllabic discussion tonight as he continues to wax......

London Architecture Biennale and Architecture Week got off to a fine if sweaty start this weekend. We’d particularly recommend ‘Transit’, an Iain Sinclair-narrated short film by Emily Richardson, in catacombs beneath Smithfield Market - spooky, thought provoking and surprisingly deserted when we visited. Here’s our pick of the many events happening over the next couple of days. And don’t worry about missing the football. They’ve thought of that… Monday Blueprint Big Breakfasts: The chance......

Another occasion where our perception is at odds with the news: Road junctions with yellow-painted no-stopping boxes that are enforced by cameras have greater congestion, as drivers are too worried about incurring a fine to pull forwards. Rather than standing empty, we've yet to see a yellow box in the road that doesn't contain at least three cars all trying to get over each other in different directions with their drivers fucking this and......

Good news for Iain Sinclair. The Temple of Mithras is going home. First the back-story. Lost for centuries, the Roman temple was rediscovered in the 1950s, after the Luftwaffe gave excavations a head start. Subsequent poking around uncovered some of the most important archaeological finds in the city’s history. 1700 years of mithraic splendour, hidden right beneath the banker's noses, was suddenly revealed. So what did they do to this site of significant historical......

OK, OK, we know most of you will be sick of reading about Hawksmoor. But Londonist are completer-finisher types, and after stalking so many lesser London luminaries we feel obliged to tackle the great church-building, conspiracy-generating architect. There must be some readers out there who haven’t read Iain Sinclair’s trademark lucidity-shy ramblings on how Hawksmoor’s six churches align with other sites of dubious significance to form a pretty pattern. Or Peter Ackroyd’s erudite reinterpretation......

Set your alarms, get your diaries out, write a reminder on the back of your hand with a biro, because Alan Moore is on the gogglebox tonight. BBC2's The Culture Show is featuring the bearded warlock and undoubted genius tonight in a 'rare television interview': In a row of terraces in Northampton lives a tall, bearded man called Alan Moore. You might never have heard of him, but he’s an internationally loved writer credited......

We've already told you about the whole Get London Reading thing, but we just wanted to remind you as because even though many of the events have been and gone you can still vote for your favourite London book. Up until March 1st you can visit LondonBooks.co.uk and choose from a shortlist of nine classic London novels: Absolute Beginners - Colin Macinnes End of the Affair - Graham Greene Great Expectations - Charles Dickens......

Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré London has been home to more double-acts than Great Yarmouth pier. Just off the top of the head, there’s Johnson & Boswell, the Adam Brothers, Holmes and Watson, the Krays, and recent North-London comedy duo Henry and Pires. Add to the mix the little-known Victorian pairing of Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, whose minor classic ‘London A Pilgrimage’ has just been re-released by Anthem Press. Londonist has wanted to......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. This part of the world is doing quite well in literary circles these days, what with all of the praise heaped on the Booker Prize nominees and Harold Pinter winning the Nobel Prize. Heck, we've even noticed some American publications musing over their readerships' envy of British literature. And to really drive the point......

Londonist, as you may have noticed, loves Iain Sinclair. We loved the interview he gave us, and we found the thing he wrote in the Guardian after the July bombings to be really moving. So why does his essay in the most recent issue of the London Review of Books leave such a bad taste in our mouths? It begins as an exploration of memorials to the war dead in London mainline train stations,......

Iain Sinclair has long been one of our favourite biographers of London (we were thrilled to talk to him a little while ago) so we have been waiting for him to pen something on last Thursday's events from his own unique perspective. He did so today in The Guardian: One week on and Hackney transport is the performance art it always was, but more so. The audience is sharper, more alert, quicker to respond.........

We'd hate to attempt to get in and out of London right now as the M25 is still closed after a fire yesterday and the police reckon it won't be fully open again until sometime this evening. Luckily the contract we were forced to sign upon becoming Londonists means we can never again leave the city so we can be kind of relaxed about this one. Although our heart goes out to people living......

Croydon has taken some flak over the years, and Londonist doesn't want to fall into the hackneyed ways of lesser commentators by adding to that already sizeable bucket of mockery. But when objective evidence is uncovered that justifies all the piss-taking… Well, maybe just this once. We will try and get through this article without using the word 'Chav', but no promises. Archaeologists in Croydon, who probably don hard hats long before reaching their......