London: The Biography

ISBN-13: 9780099422587 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 848 str.

Peter Ackroyd

Opis

A masterpiece -- the culmination and distillation of Peter Ackroyd's lifelong passion for the history and topography of London. Vividly anecdotal and brilliantly original.

Perhaps the most important study of the city ever written, London confirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic called, "our age's greatest London imagination." Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London, but this new book is his definitive account of the city. For Ackroyd's London is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, so London is The Biography, as the book is subtitled, not a History. Here Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in each age. But this is not a simple chronological record.

He writes chapters on the history of silence, the history of light, the history of childhood, the history of Cockney speech, and the history of drink. He constructs a comprehensive, multilayered image of the place, animated by his concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, and the peculiar 'echoic' quality of London which actively affects the lives and personalities of its citizens.

Recenzje

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

O autorze

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.