John Lanchester rides the London Underground | Books | The Guardian

John Lanchester rides the London Underground | Books | The Guardian: The romantic side of the first train is harder to define. It's something to do with the secret nightlife of the city, the London that is carrying on while the rest of London fidgets in its sleep. There's a romance attending on those jobs, the ones that keep things running all night long: it's part of the fascination of big cities, the sense that something is always going on somewhere, even in the smallest of small hours. Bakers and police and nurses and cab drivers and market porters all belong to that secret city, the one which rumbles along so late it starts to get early. Once or twice, carrying on a long evening by going to the place after the place I started, and then to the place after that, I've ended up in versions of this super-late or super-early London.