St. James’s Square, like many others in London, appears with little forewarning or fanfare. You leave the expensive ruckus of Piccadilly, cut down a narrow side street, and there it suddenly is: a holiday from the city, with a public garden islanded in its center. One gentle corner is home to the London Library, founded in 1841 by the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, who complained that the British Museum Library was giving him “museum headache.”
In the early nineteen-eighties, the square was also home to the Libyan Embassy, or the Libyan People’s Bureau, as it had been renamed following Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s “popular revolution.” On the morning of April 17, 1984, a crowd of anti-Qaddafi demonstrators gathered across the street from the Embassy. A smaller counter-demonstration of Qaddafi loyalists faced them…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 22, 2024