Stephen Tompkins, whose CV includes the recent sympathetic redevelopments of the Royal Court and Regent’s Park, is well aware of the need to preserve the building’s soul and its intimacy as he sets about turning leaking breeze blocks into a 21st-century theatre space.The absolute key, of course, is the auditorium, which will barely change. Its pedigree is immaculate (No?Coward, Taylor and Burton, Princess Margaret in her dancing days), and its superiority unchallenged. Kate Moss, who is the litmus paper of cool, held her 30th birthday party in the penthouse suite.Gordon Ramsay Claridge’s, Brook Street, W1 (020-7499 0099)Lonely Planet says Nobu Now more famous for Boris Becker romancing his dinner date in a broom cupboard than for its blackened cod, Nobu isn’t as C-list as the Met bar below, but it’s a slow-burner rather than the hottest restaurant in town right now.We say The Ivy Only Madame Tussauds can boast more famous faces under one roof. Claridge’s Bar is seething nightly with beautiful people – Sophie Dahl, Jasper Conran, Gwyneth Paltrow and the like. Brixton by night is as sanitised as Disneyland Paris, and Hoxton is so Dickensian and quaint that you expect to run into Ron Moody and Shani Wallis at the White Cube gallery before joining in three rousing choruses of “Oom-Pa-Pa” down at the Bricklayer’s Arms.

And in the interim, all those mouldering landmarks have been transformed into “magnificent historical architecture”.Londoners do get rapped on the knuckles for “casually chucking rubbish out of car windows” and for the ghastly public transport service. But, quibbles aside, Lonely Planet did get one thing right: “London is not a place you can ever do: it’s evolving too quickly even for its occupants to fully grasp.” And as for guidebooks…Celebrity-spotting restaurantsLonely Planet says Gordon Ramsay Traditionalists may still favour Gordon Ramsay and his delectable prix fixe lunch menu, but fashion’s gadflies have long since flitted to his dining room at Claridge’s and Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood Caf?t the Berkeley Hotel.We say Gordon Ramsay Claridge’s Tastemakers want to tread on the Balenciaga trains of famous style icons such as the Duchess of Windsor, Vivien Leigh and Jackie O, so they dine in the splendour of Gordon Ramsay Claridge’s. In the same year that we voted Tony Blair into Number 10, Vanity Fair magazine pronounced London to be the epicentre of Cool Britannia. A cover shot of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit luxuriating between the sheets of what looked like Tracey Emin’s dirty bed did little to support our nation’s cool credentials.
Calling a city cool is a cultural kiss of death and, like Harry Potter’s Dementors, the Lonely Planet Guide 2004 has opened its yawning maw and declared that London is “the place to be right now” But a cool place doesn’t need to be told It knows. To be told that you’re cool by Lonely Planet is rather like being told by Jordan that you’re the only man for her. It’s also a bit rich that, a mere two years ago, Lonely Planet dismissed London as a cross between Miss Havisham’s wedding cake and Beirut, describing the city as “a joyless, decaying place where the locals are more likely to attack you than extend a welcome”.But now, it seems, London is a multicultural wonderland.

Cozarinsky lets us imagine his fate, fading out in a series of reflections about how death always leaves behind “brief fragments of a truncated story”. This book is also a collection of strange fragments, disturbing fables rich in the sensual detail of places.The reviewer edits the ‘Jewish Quarterly’. Only cocaine keeps him going as a caf?ianist and, even in 1937, there is something luring him back to Germany. It is only after her death that he uncovers the tragic roots of this bitter obsession.Strangest of all is the story of the (presumably Jewish) musician who starts losing work in Berlin in the early 1930s and takes refuge in Argentina. Surely no one else could have shared his dream of “putting on what was then an almost forgotten opera… on an island or beside a lake”? An ageing man recalls the woman who taught him Russian literature and who, “despite admiring the poetry of Donne and Keats”, had nothing but contempt for the English and Anglophile Argentinians. A former militant tracks down the man who betrayed his group when, 25 years later, she sees a poster advertising a production of Handel’s Alcina.