Luke’s Reviews > London: The Biography > Status Update

And here we see Ackroyd attempting to argue that socioeconomic segregation into slums and ghettos is the natural result of glacial activity from thousands of years ago.

Took nearly 600 pages to mention enclosures, which explains anywhere between 50-80% of the material that precedes it. Of course, the tone doesn't convey the rapacious greed of the legal measure, but does its best to steamroll over it as a sad, yet inevitable necessity of, what. Progress? The same progress that would have us believe union strikes signal the end of the world, I suppose.

Ackroyd's "scholarship" has just now achieved the credibility of a fear mongering Facebook post.

"There is more certainty of purchasing a pineapple here, every day in the year," John Timbs's Curiosities of London declares, "than in Jamaica and Calcutta, where pines are indigenous."

Looks a lot more innocuously impressive when you aren't familiar with imperialism, monoculture, and tariffs, doesn't it.

To discuss London without mentioning enclosure is rather dishonest, and if Ackroyd insists on doing so for the next nearly 500 pages, there's not much that I'm going to be able to give him credit for.

I'll be finishing this, as I do anything I start reading on this site, but this is much more of a chain of Buzzfeed articles interspersed with Wikipedia quotes than a biography.

Didn't take long to come across Cromwell again, despite the fact that the last king chronologically mentioned was Henry III.

You'd think that most recently finished work of mine would have burned out my begrudging Anglophilia for the rest of the year, and yet. So, as always, might as well strike while the iron is still hot.