SOURCE: “In the Unreal City,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 1999, p. 21.

In the following review, Korn offers an unfavorable assessment of The Plato Papers.

Times when blind men into ditches lead the blind. … The 1920s and 30s may be fine examples of political myopia, but Peter Ackroyd’s Plato (Plato prime, Plato II, neo-Plato) takes a longer view. He observes history (his history, our future) from his mid-fourth-millennium standpoint, a freelance Academic in a new Athens on the banks of the Thames but otherwise not much like London, a city clean and green where the people speak with a sweet slangless suavity, like the worst of Wells’s futuropians. They have names like Madrigal and Sparkler. For Plato, everything from AD 1500 to 2300 is (was, will be, will have been) the age of Mouldwarp, when people pursue smoke and phantoms and no one is happy or good; Man, the...