London: A Short History - Tapa dura

What shines through is Wilson's love for the city and his anguish at what he sees as the missed opportunity of the post-war period. (KATHRYN HUGHES MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Wilson talks with passion and authority about architecture's effect on the populace. (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

Fresh from his imperious single volume on the Victorians, he is at his best on the riches and privation that the Industrial Revolution scattered among Londoners. (TIM ADAMS OBSERVER)

AN Wilson has made much of the familiar history of our capital city seem new. Very much a Londoner's book, each chapter is full of anecdote and opinion - something that readers of Wilson's Evening Standard column will know he doesn't lack. (ROBERT GYN PALMER THE RESIDENT)

Wilson evokes a strong sense of place and his astute commentary links the past with the present...This is a history of London even for people who don't readily venture into history or London. (THE HERALD)

tantalisingly excellent little book. (Gerald Isaaman CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL)

A.N. Wilson's contribution is genuinely a short history, with the main text falling just shy of 150 pages, showing his customary lucidity and zest. (TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT)

One can hear AN Wilson's voice... (THE TABLET)

as clearly ordered as any pocket A-Z (THE LITERARY REVIEW)

It's manageable, fascinating and impressively wide-ranging for its size and doesn't skimp on anecdote. (LIVING HISTORY)

The structure of the book is chronological, with digressions. From Roman and then Norman London, we move on to Chaucer's London - the city of the Peasants Revolt, Dick Whittington and the great Livery Companies. In Tudor and Stuart London many believed the city was being wrecked by over-population, over-building and the greed of speculators. Eighteenth-century London witnessed the South Sea Bubble, gin, highwaymen and the Gordon riots; but also banking, hospitals, and the elegant design of everyday things. In the nineteenth century, expanding vigorously, the city resisted any overall make-over. With Queen Victoria came the Railway Age, which made and unmade the city. Chartism, anti-semitism, overcrowding and cholera. But engineering triumphs too. If the First World War was a nightmare happening elsewhere, the amazing six years of 1939-45 were the city's finest hour. Post-1945, property developers took over, with disastrous results. The author celebrates the cosmopolitan city that mobility and immigration have created, while deploring the `moronization' of the city, exemplified by the Millennium Dome and Ken Livingstone's 2002 London Plan.