Peter Ackroyd - London The Biography Paperback Book

This listing is for Peter Ackroyd London The Biography Paperback Book.

Publisher: Anchor Books, Random House; First Anchor Edition (April, 2003)

Language: English

Paperback: 801 pages

ISBN-10: 0385497717

ISBN-13: 978-0385497718  

London: The Biography is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd's brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the listener through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction.  Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city's riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the 21st century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd's concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar "echoic" quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens. London confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called "our age's greatest London imagination."

I've read a number of histories of London, but this was the most entertaining and revealing. The author demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge of every stone and brick in the metropolis over two millennia, but doesn't present their stories in a dry, chronological fashion. It's more like strolling through a {massive) museum with hundreds of separate galleries and exhibits. Each chapter takes one discrete element of the city: a street corner, a tree, a trade, an industry, a church or institution, a fashion, a form of amusement, etc., and explores its development over the centuries and relationship to the other elements. In the end, we are left with solid evidence of the author's main thesis, which is that while the city grew and changed immensely over the centuries, its past is alive and well in everything from street names, land use patterns, language and accents, and recurring patterns of urban life.

Peter Ackroyd, (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices and the depth of his research. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.

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