Joanna

“London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved. London was both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. London - lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London - was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from the inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel