London, Peter Ackroyd
London, Peter Ackroyd
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London
The Biography

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Narrator: Nigel Patterson

Unabridged: 32 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/31/2020


Synopsis

London: The Biograph is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd's brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the listener 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."

About Peter Ackroyd

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Fabian on January 19, 2020

Riveting, complex & super well written, "The Lambs of London" is yet another fully submersive foray into a previous age from Ackroyd, whose magnum opus I feel ultimately to be "Hawksmoor." Here, we deal not with gothic architecture but with the Bard himself, ultimate emblem for all good British thin......more

Goodreads review by Frank on January 25, 2011

A rather strange little book for a number of reasons. In the first place, the eponymous characters, the brother-and-sister authors Charles and Mary Lamb (1775-1834 and 1764-1847 respectively) were not the main characters of this story. That honour belonged to one William Henry Ireland (1775-1835), f......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth (Alaska) on October 28, 2021

I picked this up at the library book sale 8 or 9 years ago. It is on the 1001 list and I wanted to take advantage of its availability (at 50 cents!). Obviously, it has languished on my shelf, patiently waiting my attention. I ignored it because I thought it was a biographical novel of people about w......more

Goodreads review by Peter on September 06, 2022

Charles and Mary Lamb are still living at their parents’ home. Charles, an aspiring writer, works as a clerk at the East India Company, and enjoys a drink or three too often at the local pub. Meanwhile his sister, Mary, is trapped in domesticity, caring for her ailing father and her maddening mother......more

Goodreads review by Virtuella on April 04, 2013

It's a nice, easy read, fairly entertaining, falling a little flat at the end. Apparently based on painstaking research, though if it had been completely made-up, it would have made little difference to me. There are two rather jarring sex scenes that have no connection with the story and which I fe......more