Details
Synopsis
The city of London, which has been the setting for many of Peter Ackroyd's novels and biographies, is the subject of this far-ranging portrait. An unorthodox history, LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY takes the city neighborhood by neighborhood and brings the city to life by means of profiles of its citizens--some famous, some not--as they endure the plague, civil war, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.
| Size | | Length: | 801 pages | | Height: | 9.2 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.8 in | | Weight: | 39.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "If you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles I is placed, at Charing Cross, your fingers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sea lilies, starfish or sea urchins. There is a photograph of that statue taken in 1839; with its images of hackney cabs and small boys in stove-pipe hats the scene already seems remote, and yet how unimaginably distant lies the life of those tiny marine creatures."
Industry Reviews
"Except for a few sections on events like the Plague and the Great Fire, which make dramatic use of first-person accounts, those looking for novelistic reconstructions of famous events will be disappointed; given the range of material he has to synthesise, Ackroyd unsurprisingly prefers to evoke the past's day-to-day texture through exposition rather than narrative. But the expository tone can be deceptive....The book is perhaps best read out of sequence as a compendium of obscure facts and anecdotes, many of which are very entertaining."
London Review of Books - Christopher Tayler (02/22/2001)
"Mr Ackroyd has covered some of [this] ground before, in novels about Nicholas Hawksmoor's architecture, Thomas Chatterton's poetry and the Great Fire of 1666, as well as biographies of Charles Dickens and Thomas More. Anybody familiar with these books knows that Mr Ackroyd is obsessed with London and with the mystical and spiritual qualities he observes within it. Drawing chiefly on literature and anecdote, this new book pulls together those strands to provide an irresistibly powerful and sometimes sinister portrait...."
Economist (10/14/2000)
"Ackroyd is on seemingly intimate terms with every corner, every turning of every street, every square, every church. This is a book of specifics: The names of streets, neighborhoods, squares and persons come at the reader one after the other, in a kind of incantatory mantra....Ackroyd's LONDON is not the fussy London of scones, Harrods and high tea, or the stately elegance of Hyde Park and the posh West End. He cares little for regal pomp and circumstance; his is not the London of picture books....In Ackroyd's vision, London is a rough and tumble town, filled with ruffians and quacks, knockabout saloons, murder, death, oppression....Ackroyd's affection for the eccentric and the odd is one the great charms of this book. Ackroyd is a writer of memorable, eccentrically rhythmic sentences that one wants to quote at length. This is not a straight history, but rather a visionary miscellany of London riffs and fugues, a meditation on the smells, sounds, crowds, churches....if Ackroyd's vision of London is dark and strange, it is also ultimately a hopeful one. His book ends on a note of London ascendant in the '90s, the hip capital of Cool Britannia."
Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.) - Matthew Price (10/14/2001)
"Ultimately, the book successfully emulates its subject: it is hard to navigate but fun to explore--baffling and fascinating by turns."
New Yorker (11/19/2001)
"[T]his book is quite exuberantly devoid of political argumentation; it is a loving portrait of a rambunctious monster, warts and all....[Ackroyd] succeeds in animating on the page the lived life of one of the oldest and greatest...cities in the world."
New York Times Book Review - Patrick McGrath (12/02/2001)
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