I’M NOT sure the Guild of Literary Critics include it in their list of approved descriptions, but really, “gorgeous” is the only word that makes sense of Alan Moore’s The Great When (Bloomsbury, £20).

It’s one of those lavish cakes of a book which is so full of plums — hilarious and horrific, touching and obscene, surreal and familiar — that you can’t help gorging yourself on it.

It belongs to the small but much-loved subgenre of “hidden London” fantasies, in which another version of the city overlaps or intersects with the one we know.