London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Doubleday, 864 pp., $45 TO AMERICAN TOURISTS, standing in line at the Tower or Westminster Abbey, London seems an old city, enveloped in architectural and ...

Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Plato Papers; T.S. Eliot; etc.) offers a huge, enthralling "biography" of the city of London. The reader segues through this litany of lists and anthology of ...

There is perhaps no other English writer today as dedicated a Londoner as Peter Ackroyd. Not only are many ... but his devotion to the city led him to write “London: The Biography.” ...

An extract from Peter Ackroyd's book Colours of London, in which he writes how red is inherently London's colour. "The buses of London have been red for longer than anyone can remember." ...

Here, though, for once the gambit is justified. Peter Ackroyd really has written the story of London as a living body and he's done it not as a stunt but because that is genuinely how he sees the ...

London Under. By Peter Ackroyd. London Under. By Peter Ackroyd. The most fascinating chapter in Ackroyd's book dwells on the creation of the London Underground. Its first route, the Metropolitan ...

She arranges the book's chapters thematically rather than chronologically; similarities can be drawn here to Peter Ackroyd's London: a biography that also maps out the history of the city through ...

The biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd once wrote we should tread carefully on the pavements of London for we are treading on skin, so how appropriate that his latest subject should be Charlie ...

On the 125th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's birth, Peter Ackroyd talks ... smells and voices of lost London. “I think if I have any sensibility,” says Ackroyd, “it would be that of a ...