A History of London

If one is going to walk through 1000-plus pages about a city, the guide had better be reliable and entertaining. Inwood, a lecturer at England's Thames Valley College, completely covers one of the millennium's major cities, but with somewhat more reliability than flair, albeit with a considered subtlety of thought and evenness of prose rare in a work of such length. As Roy Porter (England: A Social History) notes in his introduction, Inwood's London is a social London, and much of the book is spent recounting who did what when, and how much it cost them, from the Roman Londinium that waned as the empire did to the ""Divided City"" of 1965 to the present. He incorporates numerous short quotes, from Swift and Smollet to the builders, clerks and minor politicians who worked behind the city's scenes. But in the main, the book reads like the large-scale compendium of secondary sources and cullings from the public record that it is, rather than a thick description of the historically evolving qualities of London life. Although few will accompany Inwood straight through the entire trip (which he says was nine years in the preparation), the discrete chapters will be immensely useful to those to those seeking an evenhanded account of, say, the leisure activities of all classes in the 19th century or the developing London marketplace of the 14th and 15 centuries. History Book Club selection. (May)