A City of Prose 
Andrew O’Hagan
It has become the odour of the age, flowers rotting in their cellophane wrappers. People began laying them on the steps of St Pancras Church the morning after the 7 July bombings, and within a day or two the steps had been transformed into a slope of glinting paper, the flowers strangely urban behind the police cordon. It was also a slope of words: handwritten messages, emails, shop-bought cards and pavement script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on Back’ – appeared to float unabashed on a sea of London scrawls.
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Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, has been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Other articles by this contributor:
Blame it on the boogie · In Pursuit of Michael Jackson
The Nominee · With the Democrats
Disgrace under Pressure · Andrew O’Hagan reads some lad mags
Good Fibs · Truman Capote
Cartwheels over Broken Glass · worshipping Morrissey
Everything Must Go! · American Beauties
Seventy Years in a Filthy Trade · Andrew O’Hagan meets E.S. Turner
In His Hot Head · Robert Louis Stevenson
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