After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London.
So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is thrilling.
I am obsessed with the whole Victoriana thing, the whole Jack the Ripper London era, the grayness of it, the haunted feeling of it, all ancient and bloody.
'Il faut vivre' might almost be the French national motto from 1940 to June 1944, but who is to say ours would have been any different if the Germans had paraded victoriously through London and Generalfeldmarschall Von Runstedt made his headquarters at Claridge's?
Go to The Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath. It's an old-fashioned pub, and from there, you can look out over the London skyline.
I had skate wing in London. I had mine grilled with lemon and herbs, and it was the perfect seasoning for that fish.
As the mayor of London, my highest priority is keeping Londoners and visitors to our city safe from harm.
L.A. can be a little bit daunting. It is great, but it is a very cutthroat area and industry to be in, so London feels a bit more homely for me.
Shakespeare's frequent horseback journeys from London to Stratford, and from Stratford to London, must have made him familiar with the county of Oxfordshire.
I've done eight years as mayor of London. I enjoyed it hugely; it was a massive privilege.
I don't think Lloyd's of London would insure this mouth.
Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.
I grew up in the South London outer areas of Bromley and Croydon. Bromley and Croydon are interchangeable punch lines to any joke somebody wants to make about a shit part of England.
I have been on dialysis in Istanbul, Milan, Indonesia, Manila, London. It's - it's amazing.
I've this karmic connection with London.
I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.
I was shot at for being a Tamil in Sri Lanka, and then, everyone was calling me a Paki in London, and I'm not even Pakistani.
It's mad to think I was just a kid from south London, rapping in parks with friends.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
London is a roost for every bird.
