Full name: London: The Biography

Author: Peter Ackroyd Year: 2000 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Non Fiction, Travel, Biographies Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Barns&Noble Goodreads eBooks.com LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780385497718 0385497717

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 reader 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 twenty-first 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." Similar books: Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd Charlie Chaplin by Peter Ackroyd Old London Bridge by Patricia Pierce The Great Stink of London by Stephen Halliday London by Roy Porter London Under by Peter Ackroyd London by Roger Hudson Necropolis by Catharine Arnold Victorian London by Liza Picard London characters and crooks by Henry Mayhew Queer City by Peter Ackroyd Dr. Johnson's London by Liza Picard Thames by Peter Ackroyd Underground London by Stephen Smith Restoration London by Liza Picard 1700 by Maureen Waller Georgian London: Into the Streets by Lucy Inglis Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables by Catherine Reid Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure by Matthew Algeo