London Under
Peter Ackroyd
Nan A. Talese
Review<p>“There’s plenty of marvelous information in the book about what lies beneath London. . . . Ackroyd mines historical anecdotes to great effect. . . . He is not just interested in London’s hidden relics; he’s interested in what they—and the idea of an underground—mean to a culture. London’s underworld is a ‘shadow or replica of the city,’ and it is also a shadow of ourselves and our thoughts, the stuff that’s discovered when we open the trapdoor.”<br />—<em>The Daily Beast<br /></em><br />"Eloquent and visceral."<br />—<em>Kirkus Reviews<br /></em><br />Praise for *London: The Biography*<br /></p><p>“Magnificent. . . . Succeeds in animating on the page the life of one of the oldest and greatest . . . cities in the world.”<br />—<em>The New York Times Book Review</em><br /></p><p>“A wonderful book, a treasure of information and anecdote ... a book to be taken up again and again for the pleasures that lie within.”<br />—<em>The Chicago Tribune</em><br /><br />“Ackroyd writes in a wonderfully graphic style that carries the reader through historical byways effortlessly.”<br />—<em>The Denver Post</em><br /><br />“A tour de force by a writer of immense skill. . . . A treasure of information and anecdote about one of the world’s great cities, a book to be taken up again and again for the pleasures that lie within.”<br />—<em>The Seattle Times<br /></em> <br />“Packed with strange delights and bizarre occurrences. . . . Ackroyd is a writer of memorable, eccentrically rhythmic sentences that one wants to quote at length.”<br />—<em>Newsday </em></p>About the Author<p>PETER ACKROYD is the author of <em>London: The Biography</em>, <em>Shakespeare: The Biography</em>, <em>Thames: The Biography</em>, and <em>Venice: Pure City</em>; acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More; and several successful novels. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, among others. </p>