London: The Concise Biography

(Paperback)

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An abridged edition of Peter Ackroyd's magisterial biography of the city of London. An abridged edition of Peter Ackroyd's magisterial biography of the city of London. Prize-winning historian, novelist and broadcaster, Peter Ackroyd takes us on a journey - historical, geographical and imaginative - through the city of London. Moving back and forth through time, Ackroyd is an effortless, exuberant guide to times of plague and pestilence, fire and floods, crime and punishment, and sex and theatre. He brings the ever changing streets alive for the reader and shows us what lies beneath our feet and above our heads. His biography is as rich in detail and fizzing with vitality as the city itself.

Reviews

Peter Ackroyd is the greatest living chronicler of London * Independent *
Peter Ackroyd was born to write the biography of London...a brilliant book * Sunday Telegraph *
It would be no exaggeration to say that Peter Ackroyd's 'biography' of our captial is the book about London -- A N Wilson * Daily Mail *
You will not find a better, more visionary book about a place we take for granted * Observer *
[London] may be several years old but it remains one of the leading narratives as he cleverly weaves through centuries of history to reveal to us the hundreds of different cities within a city. -- Fiona Hamilton * The Times *

Author Bio

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.