The Pillars of Hercules is a pub in Greek Street

Greek Street

Greek Street is a street in Soho, London, leading south from Soho Square to Shaftesbury Avenue. The street is famous for its restaurants and cosmopolitan nature.-History:...

, Soho

Soho

Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Most of what exists now was built around 1910, but the pub dates back to 1733 . Dickens referred to it in A Tale Of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature....

, and the road at the side of the pub through the arch is named Manette Street, after Dr Manette, one of the characters from that book.

More recently, the pub has been favoured by many figures from the London literary scene, including Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

, Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton (critic)

Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher....

, Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer, and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending...

 and Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....

. Clive James

Clive James

Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...

named his second book of literary criticism (At the Pillars of Hercules) after it, apparently because that was where most of the pieces within it were commissioned, delivered or written.