Islington - in Literature

In Literature

Islington features extensively in modern English literature and culture:

• The Diary of a Nobody, an English comic novel written by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith. The main character lives off the Holloway Road in Brickfield Terrace.
• The Wilfers of Holloway feature in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.
• Douglas Adams lived in Islington and used it as a setting in his novels, and named a character in his famous Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series after a well known local estate agents - Hotblack Desiato.
• In Neil Gaiman's best selling novel Neverwhere Islington is an angel that lives under London, named after the Angel tube station.
• Martha Grimes' fictional detective, Richard Jury, lives in a flat in Islington.
• Emma Evans, protagonist of Margaret Drabble's novel The Garrick Year (1964), lives, after she has married her husband David, in "an ordinary nineteenth-century terrace house in Islington, and on either side of the front door stood a small stone lion . . . the back garden was up to the standard of the lions".
• Simon Gray's play Otherwise Engaged is set in Islington. It was written in the 1970s.
• In The Zoo, a comic opera by Arthur Sullivan and B. C. Stephenson, two of the main characters are the Duke of Islington and his beloved, whom he asks to become the Duchess of Islington.
• Nick Hornby's book, and later film, About a Boy are set in Islington.
• Nick Hornby's novel SLAM is set in Islington.
• Joan Smith's female detective, Loretta Lawson, lives in Islington.
• The film, Notes on a Scandal is set in Islington.