I’m going to review this book by writing a bunch of sentences that will all, individually, be true. “But wait,” you might be thinking to yourself. “Isn’t that how reviewing things usually works? You don’t often tell lies in reviews.”

True! However, in this case, what you need to understand is that some of those sentences are going to contradict other sentences. As it works out, this is quite appropriate for this very, very odd book. You are simply going to have to live with the fact that while each individual sentence of this review is true, the entire review may, somehow, not be.

Roll with it, is what I’m saying.

So, the following are true:

• I gave this book five stars on Goodreads and Storygraph. (Follow me on Storygraph!)
• This book is not currently on my Best Books of 2025 shortlist.
• I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up on the list anyway.
• It is nearly eight hundred pages long, and I did not finish reading it. I put it down with about 75 pages left and I have no real intention of going back to those 75 pages anytime soon.
• Insofar as such a thing is possible in the first place, this book is not a biography of London, much less The biography of London.
• It is only barely a history of London.
• London is 2,000 years old and that’s only if you don’t count the even older civilizations that lived there, deep into prehistory. Writing a single book about all of this is ludicrous.
• This book is divided into multiple themed sections. The themes will be broken down into some variable number of chapters. Some chapters are only a couple of pages long, some are much longer.
• The themes may sound like they’re historical, or they might be things like “Night” and “Day,” where the author is more or less just riffing. There are sections on prostitutes and violence and war and walls and food and prostitutes and noise and commerce and clothes and jail and medicine and asylums and kings and prostitutes and children and the Great London Fire of 1666, which is distinct from the other dozen or so times the city has burned down over the years.
• So, so many prostitutes.
• Any given chapter might quote anyone, from any time period, in any language. If that author was writing in French the quote is going to be in French. If he was writing in Medieval English, you might be in some trouble. If he was writing in Old English, Þu scealt hopian þæt þu miht witan hwæt hi secgað.
• This means that occasionally you’ll see things like Dickens and some Roman historian you’ve never heard of or some English writer from the 13th century quoted together within a few paragraphs.
• Peter Ackroyd is an engaging, immensely erudite author.
• There is very much such a thing as “too much of a good thing.”
• It took me a week to read seven hundred pages after spending the whole summer devouring 700-page books in a day or two. This book must be approached in bite-size pieces.
• I am, almost certainly because of the style in which the book was written, genuinely not sure that I learned much of anything. The author’s intent was not to present you with carefully organized information about London. It was to spend hundreds of pages coasting on vibes.
• If you want to read this, go ahead, but I’m never just going to casually recommend that anyone read it. Like, if you told me “I want to learn more about London’s history,” I would never give you this book.
• English nouns sound dumb to Americans in a way that I’m never able to clearly elucidate, and I wonder what they think of our place names. I can’t take locations called Cheapside or Marylebone or, I am not fucking with you, Gropecunt (prostitutes!) seriously.
• So many prostitutes.

So yeah. Maybe you’ll read this. I’m glad I did. I think.