It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. - George VIAs George VI so rightly said, it is the loves, schemes, failures, battles, intrigues and dreams, of the people who live in a city that make it what it is. And in a city as vibrant and chaotic as London those lives are going to be quite extraordinary.Seeking to unravel the stories locked within each district, London expert David Long turns to the characters that have defined them. From Nanci Astor, Jimmi Hendrix and Harry Gordon Selfridges influence on Mayfair, to Karl Marx on Soho, Charles Darin on Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf on Fitzrovia and Polly the Parrot on Spitalfields, A History of London in 50 Lives, is a positive smorgasbord of the illustrious and notorious.