London. The Biography

(London: Chatto & Windus, 2000) 1856197166. 8vo; original grey boards, lettered in silver gilt on spine; laminated pictorial dustwrapper; decorative endpapers; pp. xxiv + 822, incl. index; plates; illustrations in text. Light foxing to edges. Very good condition. "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 London is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, so his LONDON is a 'biography' not 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 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. Anecdotal, brilliant 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 affirms Ackroyd's status as what one critic has called 'our age's greatest London imagination'." .