A History of London

Since its first-century beginnings as a Roman outpost on the banks of the Thames to its status in the twenty-first as a cosmopolitan world capital, London has belonged to outsiders. From Europe's major cultural centers and every English-speaking corner of the Commonwealth, in successive waves of migration they have come to London -- the merchants and traders, the artists and artisans, the refugees and dreamers and speculators and financiers -- and each in their turn has left a distinctive mark on the city's cultural map. For Stephen Inwood, London's history belongs primarily to these people whose tastes, talents, trades, and pocketbooks have continually reinvented the grand metropolis -- and sometimes threatened to destroy it. Drawing on a multitude of sources and an abundance of unfamiliar anecdotes, Inwood tirelessly explores the history of a city defined as much by the mob as the monarch, and on every page shows why, as Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."