Howse is Soho's Boswell ... this is an astonishing piece of reportage ... It is also a piece of social history that will be vital in future decades for anyone who wants to know what Soho was really like.

Harry Mount, The Tablet

Elegiac … [a] sensitive, well-drawn book

Will Self, Guardian

Opening this book is like walking into a heavy drinkers' pub ... Fortunately the Virgil guiding readers through this particular hell is Christopher Howse ... Thorough and likeable

Financial Times

Howse is […] such a deft sketcher of people that we feel as if we do know them

Daily Telegraph

Honesty is the thread that holds his book together. It WAS like that

Nicholas Lezard, Spectator

In Soho in the Eighties Howse chronicles a doomed world of 'poets, painters, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts'

The Times