Ford Madox Ford The Soul of London 1905
London, Everyman, 1995 m A Survey of a Modern City
London, in fact, is so essentially a background, a matter so much more of masses than of individuals, so much more, as it were, a very immense symphony-orchestra than a quartette party with any leader not negligible, that its essential harmony is not to be caught by any human ear…..London is wonderfully open-minded. (12)
London is the world town, not because of its vastness; it is vast because of its assimilative powers….. [it] is the high-water mark of achievement of the Modern
Spirit. (13)
Immense without being immediately impressive …. London, perhaps because of its utter lack of unity, of plan, of the art of feeling, is the final expression of the Present
Stage.(13)
But so many things – as obvious as the enormously increased size, as secondary as the change in our habits of locomotion – militate against our nowadays having an impression, a remembered bird’s-eye-view of London as a whole….London is illimitable. (15)
London is a thing of these ‘bits’.(23)
Nowadays we have discovered, as if in the night, a new secret of rapid communication: with that, as with every previous modification of the kind, the face of London bids fair to change unrecognisably. (27)
They [familiar things] grow unfamiliar on the motor car….the outlines grew tremulous, it all vanished with a touch of that pathos like a hunger that attaches to all things of which we see the beginnings or the middle courses without knowing the ends. It was impressive enough – the modern spirit expressing itself in terms not of men but of forces….(29)
No doubt men are at work in the engine-belly of the crane, just as others were very far away among the dynamos that kept us moving. But they were sweating invisible.
That, too, is the Modern Spirit: great organizations run by men as impersonal as the atoms of our own frames, noiseless, and to all appearances infallible. (30)
… the product of the quality of rapid transit is London itself…(33)

… one may grow bewildered to the point of losing hold of one’s identity amid the crash and charge of goods trucks. (41)
Incidents even so definite as these are more or less the exception, but the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train windows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. (43)
As with the individuals so with the Body Politic, or with London, the modern World
Town. (78)
You carry away from it a vague kaleidoscope picture – lights in clusters, the bare shoulders, white flannel on green turf in the sunlight, darkened drawing rooms with nasal voices chanting parodies of prayers, the up and down strokes of fiddle bows, the flicker of fifty couples whirling around before you as with a touch of headache you stood in a doorway, a vague recollection of a brilliant anecdote, the fag end of a conversation beneath the palms of a dimmed conservatory, and a fatigue and a feverish idea that if you had missed anyone of those unimportant things you would have missed life. (80)
All these things flicker through the dazed and quiescent minds without leaving a trace, forgotten as soon as the first step is made upon the platform at Mark Lane… as much forgotten as any telegraph pole that flickered past the train window out towards the suburbs. (86)
Connected thinking has become nearly impossible, because it is nearly impossible to find any general idea that will connect one train of thought. (88)
…this huge world that is London…(91)
An awakened sense of observation is in London bewildering and nerve-shattering, because there are so many things to see and because these things flicker by so quickly. (96)
For here in London we have no more any neighbours. (97)
The City itself has no longer any visible bounds, walls or demarcations. (104)
That indeed is the problem which is set before London – the apotheosis of modern life. (111).