Facts of life
very morning on his way to work, Francis Spufford passed a plaque in South London commemorating the site where, in 1944, a German V2 rocket destroyed a branch of Woolworths, killing 168 people, 15 of them children. Spufford is the author of a dazzlingly clever tribute to the 18thcentury novel, and, a partially novelised, partly historical analysis of the Soviet economy in the 1950s.
