![]() ![]() ![]() London: The Biography - Ackroyd risks the hubris of the definite article - is an epic of celebration and assimilation, the absorption of libraries, the navigation of maps, the accessing of half-forgotten voices. ![]() Now it is time for a more demanding form of necromancy: the biographer must transcribe the last testament of the metropolitan corpse, a zone of "weariness and lassitude" staggering on the cusp of a new millennium. Ackroyd had maintained a gold-top literary profile by ventriloquising the dead - Blake, Wilde, Dickens, Eliot, Thomas More. All the contrary currents of London life are on display, the grand spectacles and sacrifices that have animated a fabulous 20-year project. Sensing that this is no longer a period for carefully contrived fictions, Ackroyd has returned to the material that inspired those fictions: fires, frauds, magicians, architects and emblematic children. ![]()
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