Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsby, which has left the English thanking Americans and the Americans thanking English for a century now, I took my copy to the spot where that nightingale fledged. There is a small pub garden by London’s Hampstead Heath where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero, the Romantic princeling John Keats, composed his Ode to a Nightingale.
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