Product Description

'Roy Porter, a historian of formidable range, turns to urban history in this marvellously lucid, informative and passionate book... Porter's facts are always at the service of the narrative, which has a finely maintained momentum, balancing statistics with the words of historians, diarists and novelists, poets and churchmen: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, Spark, ... a timely and brilliant book.' CLAIRE TOMALIN, EVENING STANDARD 'A vivid celebration of the city, but also an elegy for its decline, bubbling with statistics and anecdote, from Boadicea to Betjeman.' RICHARD HOLMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25075 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Review
Vigorous, well-illustrated survey of England's capital, from its earliest times to the present decade, covering buildings and government as well as trade, transport, manufacture and daily life. Plentiful quotations from earlier authors display the width of Porter's reading; his love of London is as evident as his mastery of the historian's trade. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
ROY PORTER is Professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London. He is most recently the author of THE GREATEST BENEFIT TO MANKIND (HarperCollins, 1998) and the forthcoming (10/00) Allen Lane title ENLIGHTENMENT: BRITAIN AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN WORLD.