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By Root 174 0

and some actually believed that the entire book was a joke. But it was in fact filled with the sort of food that is served at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, and was served there before any current Londoner was actually alive. (Although by London standards it is considered quite a baby; Simpson’s was founded in the early nineteenth century.) You know what you’re going to get when you enter its dining room, called the Grand Divan, which features paneling as dark and glossy and plaster ceilings as richly ornamented as those in a Victorian novel of the upper classes. And if you didn’t apprehend the menu from your surroundings, you can intuit it from the 1910 novel Howards End, in which the heroine has “humourously lamented” that she has never been there—even then, it was a bit of an old fogy spot—and is taken to lunch by the older man she will later marry. “What’ll you have?” he asks.

“Fish pie,” said she, with a glance at the menu.

“Fish pie! Fancy coming for fish pie to Simpson’s. It’s not a bit the thing to go for here.”

And finally he concludes, “Saddle of mutton, and cider to drink. That’s the type of thing. I like this place, for a joke, once in a way. It is so thoroughly Old English.”

And it still is. Most of the wait staff spends the lunch hours pushing around silver-domed trolleys under which are enormous joints of meat and side portions of Yorkshire pudding. It is also possible to order potted shrimps, steak-and-kidney pudding, treacle sponge, and a savoury of Welsh rarebit—in short, an English meal impervious to the passage of time or culinary fashion. Very little on the menu would be available, or even desirable, in any New York City restaurant I know. “It’s a pity, really,” said one of my London book editors. “At lunch in New York no one eats, no one smokes, and no one drinks.”

That about covers it.

Most of my London acquaintances were quick to remind me that Simpson’s, although it has long had a reputation for literary lunches, was now serving them mostly to editors preparing to retire to a cottage in the Cotswolds, and that there were plenty of restaurants in Notting Hill or even around the Inns of Court that served rare tuna and mesclun salads to the younger, hipper set. But I reminded them right back that it is often at the flagrant margins that we learn to first attach ourselves to a place. That’s why many of us who become Anglophiles in absentia, as it were, did so originally not through great literature, Defoe or Dr. Johnson, but through mystery stories and romantic novels, through manservants like Bunter and Lugg and heroes who gambled at Boodles and bought their boots in Bond Street.

For many Americans of a certain age, that Technicolor London first presented itself in the form of a big book about the glories of the city written by a woman who had never actually been there. Forever Amber was published in 1944, when the war had made satins and velvets an impossible luxury and the real world a sad, gray, and tattered place. It sold 100,000 copies in its first week and was the bestselling book in the United States during the decade after its publication. This despite—or perhaps because of—the widespread denunciations of the novel by religious and civic leaders as obscene and immoral, a denunciation that seems quaint in light of today’s standards for sex scenes and language.

Nominally, Forever Amber is a story set during the Restoration about a courtesan with the overwrought name of Amber St. Clare. Charles II is an important character, and so are a number of actual nobleman from his court. Amber is not only impregnated by the king and imprisoned in Newgate (like her more moral, more realistic fictional sister Moll Flanders); she also survives both the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London.

Like most bodice rippers, Forever Amber may smell of sex, but it’s really about love, the undying love Amber feels, even while married to a succession of husbands and entertaining a succession of lovers, for a buff guy named Bruce, or, as she likes to call him, “Lord Carlton.” It’s also about a great love affair with