London: The Biography

Peter Ackroyd

Jul 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Nigel Patterson

About this audiobook

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 the author

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.

British audiobook narrator and AudioFile Earphones Award winner Nigel Patterson has many credits as a stage, screen, and voice-over actor that influence his powerful characterization across a broad range of genres. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he is fluent in French and Spanish.