SOURCE: “Into the Labyrinth,” in New Statesman, October 16, 2000, p. 51.

In the following review, Self offers praise for London.

In a decade that has seen two large and structurally sound pillars erected in the ever-expanding historiographic monument of London—Roy Porter's London: A Social History and Stephen Inwood's A History of London—comes Peter Ackroyd's sublime capstone [London: A Biography]. Porter's work conceived of the city in terms of its inhabitants' quotidian lives, social mores, political organisations and their religious turmoils. Inwood's looked to the city as an entrepot of the Hegelian world spirit, detailing the personages and events that have enmeshed London, both with its own past and that of other political realities. But Ackroyd has encountered the great modern Babylon face to face. He has bearded it and felt the heft of its mighty agglomeration of masonry, metal, wood and earth. He has discoursed with its teeming...