Ed Glinert

Ed Glinert was born in Dalston, east London, and came to books through journalism. After sharing a student journalist of the year award in 1981, he founded the Manchester magazine City Life. In the 1990s he worked for Private Eye and was launch production editor of the music magazine Mojo. He began leading walks with London Walks in 2003 and set up New Manchester Walks in 2009.

His books are place-based nonfiction, the kind that treats a street as a pile of stories. His first, A Literary Guide to London (Penguin, 1998), traced writers through the city's addresses. The London Compendium (Penguin, 2003) works through the capital area by area, street by street. East End Chronicles (Allen Lane, 2005) narrows the focus to one district and its crime, immigration and reinvention. More recently he wrote 111 Places in London's East End That You Shouldn't Miss for Emons, and his agency lists further 111 titles on Yorkshire and Essex.

On WebToTell he appears as the annotator of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. For Penguin Classics he supplied the chronology, further reading and explanatory notes, alongside an introduction by Iain Pears. The edition was first published in 2001, and the notes carried over into the 2018 Penguin Clothbound Classics hardback.

Start with the stories and keep the notes beside you. If that edition leaves you curious about the city Holmes walked through, the next book to pick up is The London Compendium, which is easy to dip into one neighbourhood at a time. East End Chronicles is the better choice if you want one story told at length.