London The Biography

"Except for a few sections on events like the Plague and the Great Fire, which make dramatic use of first-person accounts, those looking for novelistic reconstructions of famous events will be disappointed; given the range of material he has to synthesise, Ackroyd unsurprisingly prefers to evoke the past's day-to-day texture through exposition rather than narrative. But the expository tone can be deceptive....The book is perhaps best read out of sequence as a compendium of obscure facts and anecdotes, many of which are very entertaining."Ackroyd, Peter is the author of 'London The Biography', published 2003 under ISBN 9780385497718 and ISBN 0385497717.