Peter Ackroyd at his most magical and magisterial - a glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of Venice- ultimate city.
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; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.
Yet another wonderful biography of a city
*The Independent on Sunday*
He is brilliant on beginnings... Ackroyd covers an immense amount
of ground with verve and elegance
*Independent on Sunday*
Ackroyd tells the story well...where he excels is in his
descriptions...he writes beguilingly
*Guardian*
Ackroyd is hugely intelligent and formidably industrious; there can
be few people, Venetian or foreign, who know Venice better than
he... It is full of good things
*Daily Telegraph*
Elegant... Interweaving psychogeographical investigation with
history, picking out defining characteristics which were present
from its earliest days
*Scotsman*
Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Canterbury Tales) provides a history of and meditation on the actual and imaginary Venice in a volume as opulent and paradoxical as the city itself. Structured and organized with a fluidity that reflects its many-faceted subject, he launches his tour de force with the basics of Venetian geography, hydrology, and climate before turning to history and architecture. The narrative continues to develop around themes both usual and unexpected such as trade and gossip or subjects such as the city's fabled churches, its love of sexuality, and theater. As it glides along, it gracefully incorporates tidbits about such traditions as the cabins on gondolas and the masks worn during Carnival. How Ackroyd deftly catalogues the overabundance of the city's real and literary tropes and touchstones is itself a kind of tribute to La Serenissima, as Venice is called, and his seductive voice is elegant and elegiac. The resulting book is, like Venice, something rich, labyrinthine and unique that makes itself and its subject both new and necessary. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Yet another wonderful biography of a city -- Lesley McDowell * The
Independent on Sunday *
He is brilliant on beginnings... Ackroyd covers an immense amount
of ground with verve and elegance * Independent on Sunday *
Ackroyd tells the story well...where he excels is in his
descriptions...he writes beguilingly * Guardian *
Ackroyd is hugely intelligent and formidably industrious; there can
be few people, Venetian or foreign, who know Venice better than
he... It is full of good things * Daily Telegraph *
Elegant... Interweaving psychogeographical investigation with
history, picking out defining characteristics which were present
from its earliest days * Scotsman *
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