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This is a very literate collection of fourteen stories that date from 1990 through 2011. They're interspersed with brief sections detailing odd and obscure bits of history of places in London, and there's an autobiographical foreword remembering Christmas during the blitz, and an afterword discussing lost London writers. At times I was unable to tell the fact from the fiction; for example, Moorcock occasionally appears as a character but then some of his fictional characters are mentioned. Most of the stories are set in London, but there's one good Elric story, A Portrait in Ivory, and the longest story in the book, The Cairene Purse, is set in Egypt. There's no obvious speculative element in many of the stories; the best is certainly the title story. Una Persson and Begg and Von Bek and the Cornelius family all appear, or at least are mentioned from time to time, so there's a clear connection with the Eternal Champion/multiverse tapestry, though the main thrust is to portray the city and its inhabitants in a series of vignettes and character studies that range from the 19th century up to the time of Thatcher. It's mostly slow paced and nostalgic, but quite interesting.