Overview

A masterpiece- London- A Biography is the culmination and distillation of Peter Ackroyd's lifelong obsession with the history and topography of London. Vividly anecdotal and brilliantly original. Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, so London is a biography rather than a history. It differs from other histories, too, in the range and diversity of its contents. Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. There are chapters on the history of silence and the history of light, the history of childhood and the history of suicide, the history of Cockney speech and the history of drink. London is perhaps the most important study of the city ever written, and confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called 'our age's greatest London imagination.'

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Fizzles with vitality and originality -- Sunday Times <br> Marvellous - the book about London. -- Daily Mail <br> Peter Ackroyd was born to write the biography of London...A brilliant book. -- Sunday Telegraph

Fizzles with vitality and originality -- Sunday Times <br><br> Marvellous - the book about London. -- Daily Mail <br><br> Peter Ackroyd was born to write the biography of London...A brilliant book. -- Sunday Telegraph

It would be no exaggeration to say that Peter Ackroyd's 'biography' of our capital is the book about London. It contains a lifetime of reading and research-but this huge book is light and airy and playful-[He] leads us on a journey both historical and geographical, but also imaginative. Every street, alley and courtyard has a story, and Ackroyd brings it to life for us - marvellous -- A N Wilson Daily Mail Nothing can quite match the huge strange echo chamber of life-stories, folktales, and urban myths conjured up in Peter Ackroyd's epic vision of his native city. Sparkling, witty scholarship is constantly transformed into smoky mystical street-history, with dark hypnotic meditations on fog, fire, sewage, suicide and civic resurrection -- Richard Holmes Daily Telegraph Ackroyd is the most effortless guide. You wander by his side through the streets of the old city, savouring its bustle, colours and its smells, the stink of living. This is much more than history; it is a tapestry of inspiration and love. You will not find a better, more visionary book about a place we take for granted Observer It's this decade's finest work of non-fiction -- Jude Rogers The Word [London] may be several years old but it remains one of the leading narratives as he cleverly weaves through centuries of history to reveal to us the hundreds of different cities within a city -- Fiona Hamilton The Times

An impressionistic history of England's capital city, by British novelist/biographer Ackroyd ( The Plato Papers , 2000, etc.), who knows his subject well and writes about it with considerable passion. This is not a history in any usual sense of the term, still less a travelogue or walking guide, although it has elements of all of these genres. What the author attempts to provide instead is a roughly chronological portrait of the character or soul of a great metropolis, drawn in large part from contemporary accounts of widely divergent veracity and literary skill. Folk tales, ballads, royal chronicles, Restoration comedies, journalism, court records, ecclesiastical histories, novels, biographies, and gossip columns (going back to Addison and Steele) all come into play, and the resulting mosaic is graced by a richness and depth of color that go a long way towards making up for the unwieldy size and loose organization. The London as Theatre section, for example, takes us into the bear-baiting pit as well as the Globe Playhouse, while London's Outcasts examines the plight of the city's downtrodden from the medieval beggars clustered about the gates of churches and monasteries to the madmen who haunted the asylum wards of Bedlam. Eventually Ackroyd finds his focal concern in wondering what is it, now, to be a Londoner? He concludes that the city is of such immensity, so variegated in its component functions and populations, and so rich in historical associations, that it is all singular and all blessed. Although the author does not quote Samuel Johnson's aphorism that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, he does illustrate Johnson's assertion that London has therein all that life affords. Somewhat rarefied, but a splendid tribute to the great metropolis. (Kirkus Reviews)

It comes as no surprise that the biographer of famous Londoners such as Dickens, Blake and Thomas More should now turn his talents to London itself. The subject almost seems to be one that Ackroyd has been limbering up to tackle for many years, given the prominence that the city assumes in novels such as Hawksmoor, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Claiming that London, a living organism, requires a biography instead of a history, he seeks to capture its vitality and uniqueness through a myriad of sources and many years of experience as one of the greatest connoisseurs of the city's past. Illustrated in both colour and black and white, the book charts the growth of London from the days when mammoths roamed its forests (the bones of one of them were excavated in 1690 at what would later become King's Cross) to the opening of the Tate Modern. But this is not a typical chronological history. London for Ackroyd is a palimpsest still bearing the visible imprints of Roman roads and forts, Saxon churches, Viking raids and medieval wells - all as real and as vibrant, and as much a part of today's London, as the city's more recent landmarks. It is this relationship between the past and the present - what he calls a 'continuity of experience' - that intrigues Ackroyd and makes for some of the book's most fascinating reading. Did you know, for example, that Clerkenwell has been home, at one time or another, to a continuum of social radicals such as Wat Tyler, the Chartists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Marx's daughter, Lenin and, most recently, The Big Issue? There are accounts, as you would expect, of well-known events like the plague, the Great Fire and the Blitz, but also sections on smells, children, magic, suicide and murder. The account of murder London-style recounts the history of Jack the Ripper, of course, but also points out the evidence for a serial strangler in the 18th century whose trademark was biting off his victim's noses. Ackroyd states in his Preface that London can never be glimpsed in its entirety, only experienced 'as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares'. He does a superb job of guiding us through this maze, leading us through the centuries and, like a Victorian police constable, shining his torch into the most obscure byways to reveal the sinister, the arcane and the marvellous. Reviewed by Ross King, author of Brunelleschi's Dome (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

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