In "London: The Biography", Peter Ackroyd indulges himself to the point of nausea. It is as if the book is completely unedited - certainly Ackroyd has not self-edited. Its non-linear structure, where anecdotes are piled upon anecdotes without any relation to each other, is distracting and confused. Many chapters touch on the same material but are separated by hundreds of pages. Other chapters start out as essays on a particular subject, but the subject has changed completely by chapter's end. Most annoying of all is Ackroyd's constant re-use of the same phrasing, with the end of paragraph repeat: "such is the heart/soul/mystery/etc. of London" his most heinous crime. It is a book in desperate need of a complete re-write.

A writer with lesser status than Ackroyd would never have had the work printed in its present form. It's a mess - an enjoyable mess, true, but a mess none the less. An editor with more guts would have sent him away and said "come back in a year when you have tamed this beast". The non-linear style simply doesn't work when he is so digressive - the straight ahead approach may not be innovative, but when one is dealing with such a massive subject, possibly the right one. Sadly for Ackroyd, his assertion that this book is THE Biography of London is shown up as an arrogant and ill-founded presumption.