The City of London, whose resident population hardly equals that of Dover, but whose precincts over a million persons enter daily, Sunday excepted, on business bent.

A. H. Beavan, Imperial London

Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson . . . I can’t dispute it. After seven years of living in the country in a sort of place where a dead cow draws a crowd, London can seem a bit dazzling.

Bill Bryson (b. 1951)

Fragmentarily the City is nothing, but collectively it is gigantic . . .

Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906), City and Suburb

The City is a world within itself. Centred in the heart of the metropolis, with its innumerable capacities for commercial pursuits, it presents at first sight, to a stranger, a most mysterious and unfathomable labyrinth of lanes and alleys, streets and courts, of lanes thronged with bustling multitude whose various occupations, though uniting in one grand whole, seem to have no direct association with each other.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Lothair

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018)