In Pursuit of the English is a novelist’s account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you’ve probably never met or even read about—though they are the real English. The cast of characters—if that term can be applied to real people—includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. S...