Since Michèle Roberts moved south of the River Thames some sixteen years ago, the pages of her diaries have filled with notes about her bus travels. These brilliantly observed vignettes depict the city in all its rackety diversity as she lends an ear to fellow passengers of all ages and walks of life. Roberts is alive to the eccentric and the mundane alike, as well as to her own changeable perception, and captures the mercurial quality of metropolitan bus journeys in and out of south London. Fleeting they may be, but these encounters on London buses are recorded with tremendous warmth and wit, and these diary extracts distil a lifetime of literary craft.
