Today is Thursday 7 July, a date which is likely, by the time this issue of the LRB is read, to have been abbreviated to 7/7, even if the atrocity in London proved a lot less horrific in its consequences than 9/11. Thursday being this paper's day for going to press, I'd written for 'Short Cuts' a few hundred mildly disobliging words about London's having been awarded the 2012 Olympics. I was more pleased than I'd expected to be, but the overjoy of some people was hard to fathom; was that excessively jubilant crowd in Trafalgar Square, I asked myself, a gathering of Balfour Beatty shareholders? If the Olympics coming to London means that rundown bits of the city are going to be 'regenerated', all well and good, but you have to wonder why it takes the Olympics to bring about that thoroughly desirable change.

LRB 21 July 2005 | PDF Download