Melvyn Bragg, the television and radio presenter whose writing has sometimes struggled to be accepted by the literary establishment, has also been knocked out before the final round.The Booker Prize winner for 2001 will be chosen at a televised ceremony at Guildhall, London, on Wednesday 17 October.Last year’s winner was the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood with her novel The Blind Assassin, which had been the bookies’ favourite.. Like all great cities, London is a place of often perplexing contradictions. Henry James called it “dreadful, delightful”, capturing succinctly the sense of London as a place of extremes. A city of vast wealth and crushing poverty, a sprawling urban zone comprised of discrete villages, quintessentially English yet vibrantly cosmopolitan – the metropolis defies easy description.Like all great cities, London is also a place of continuous change.

Jerry White’s weighty, lucid and engaging history of London in the last century explores change in the city on a number of fronts: shifting population; streets and buildings; governments; and its cultural life. The great trick in writing about such a shape-shifting metropolis is in finding points of focus without oversimplifying and, in this, White succeeds brilliantly.
He begins with the legacy of the Victorian “city of dreadful night”. By 1900, London was the world’s largest and most significant city, the financial and governmental centre of the Empire. Although we often think of Victorian London as a dark, Dickensian labyrinth, the Victorians were extraordinary modernisers with “a passion for the new at the expense of the old”, pulling down streets and clearing slums with zeal.This modernising impulse continued into the 20th century. The Victorian “Holborn to Strand Improve- ment” plan led to Kingsway and Aldwych opening in 1905, and the Edwardians continued in this grand vein. Municipal structures such as Admiralty Arch and the War Office, hotels such as the Ritz on Piccadilly; commercial palaces such as Selfridge’s on Oxford Street – all combined to make the Edwardian Grand Manner an extension of the Victorian passion for imperial splendour. As White understands, for 50 years after 1900 “the Victorian legacy produced two Londons.

The first was inner London, essentially Victorian, changing certainly but in ways foretold… The second was a vast suburban girdle formed largely in the 20 years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second – brighter, less crowded, with new building forms and new industries”.There has always been a struggle between past and present in London, and the clean lines of modernism came late and never quite took hold. As White notes, 19th-century visions of London continue today. Yet, despite the fuss, the red-brick modernism of the new British Library sits nicely beside the in-your-face Gothicism of St Pancras station – another sharp contrast that we will get used to.As the physical space of London was changing , so too were its people. “From a pre-war London where ‘cosmopolis’ was confined to Soho and the East End, by the the mid-1980s virtually any main street in the capital could cater for the needs and desires of every major culture round the globe.” Beginning with the Caribbean migration at mid-century, London became truly multicultural and, says White, “the West Indian diaspora” of the 1940s and 1950s “was the key event in the remaking of the Londoner.”As colonialism gave way to post-colonialism, people from around the world came to London to “claim their inheritance from a fast-dissolving Empire”. Maltese, Hong Kong Chinese, Pakistanis and Indians, East Africans, Turks and Cypriots, in addition to North Americans, Europeans and many others– poured into London making it one of the most diverse cities in the world.While there was (and is) xenophobia and racism, “London was seen as a successful cosmopolis, relatively free from the inter-communal strife that had bedevilled the great urban areas of North America… and free from those ‘guest-worker’ tensions of continental Europe”.Apart from its spaces and its people, there are other London stories in Jerry White’s history, including a final sobering chapter on London’s on-going politics of frustration.

How the Ken Livingstone versus New Labour drama will help the city continue to accommodate change in the 21st century remains to be seen – but change it will.. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott will not face charges in connection with his scuffle with a protester during the General Election campaign, police said today. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott will not face charges in connection with his scuffle with a protester during the General Election campaign, police said today.
North Wales Police, who compiled a report on the incident in Rhyl in May, said the Crown Prosecution Service had advised them that there should be no further action.The force launched an investigation after Mr Prescott punched farm worker Craig Evans after he was hit by an egg as he arrived for a rally.Reacting to today’s news, Mr Prescott said: “The authorities have now made their decision and I have no further comment to make.”North Wales Police said in a statement: “The Crown Prosecution Service has conducted a careful review of the substantial file of evidence and video material presented by investigators.”The conclusion in Mr Prescott’s case is that, for reasons of self defence, there is not a realistic prospect of a conviction.”In Mr Evans’s case, the CPS has concluded that a prosecution would serve no useful purpose, taking into account the minor nature of the assault as well as the fact that he suffered some minor injury himself and spent several hours in police custody.”Neither party has made any allegations about this incident. Accordingly, no further police action is anticipated.”The solicitor acting for Craig Evans, Gwynn Jones, said: “Craig Evans is extremely happy that the Crown Prosecution Service has advised the police that no further action is to be taken.”He’s extremely relieved that proceedings have been brought to an end and he’s extremely grateful for the support that he has received from the vast number of people during the course of the last few weeks.”It has, of course, been a stressful time for him and his family and he’s relieved the matter is now over,” added Mr Jones.Mr Prescott always insisted that he was acting in self–defence when he landedthe punch on Mr Evans after he felt a blow to the head, which was caused by the egg.The two men had to be separated by aides after the confrontation which was captured by television cameras and photographers.The altercation became the most talked–about event of the General Election campaign and distracted attention away from Labour’s manifesto launch.. The world’s most enormous pair of shredded tulle angel wings threatened to engulf Nicholas Coleridge when they passed by at the London show of the designer Hamish Morrow yesterday. This, it almost goes without saying, is hardly the most diplomatic of moves. The world’s most enormous pair of shredded tulle angel wings threatened to engulf Nicholas Coleridge when they passed by at the London show of the designer Hamish Morrow yesterday.

This, it almost goes without saying, is hardly the most diplomatic of moves.
Mr Coleridge, chairman of the British Fashion Council, London Fashion Week’s governing body, and managing director of Cond?ast UK, took it in his stride, however. As well he might.Morrow, 32, is currently leader of the “next big thing” brigade – heading up the bright young talent the British fashion capital is famous for. Not only has his work been featured in the fashion bible Vogue in this country – despite the fact that he is only in his second season – but also American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, flew him to New York recently for a rare audience.Wintour, often described as the most powerful woman in fashion, can make or break a designer – she is largely responsible for the stellar positions of both Marc Jacobs and John Galliano in the glittering fashion universe.For his second show, Morrow sent models, dressed from head to toe in white, through a pool of ultraviolet water. Their shoes and the trailing hems of fragile pleated skirts were thus dyed in that colour, which bled prettily on to the runway as they walked.Clothing was complex and played on a contrast between traditionally glamorous materials and hi-tech acrylics. Deconstructed skirts, dresses and jackets wrapped around slender bodies in ever more intricate ways. Delicate damasks with unfinished edges and flashes of gleaming crystal blended effortlessly with Airtex and the type of fabrics more readily associated with professional sportswear than designer fashion.The ease of casual clothing fused with the intricacy and embellishment of modern haute couture.True, it was hardly commercial. The amount of work that goes into each piece means that it will be hugely expensive if ever produced But that is not the point.