| Summary: |
Boris Johnson has always championed England's capital as the best big city in the world - a place he loves for its energy, creativity and vast range of people and cultures, the global capital of finance, culture, cuisine, the home of sport, a place with more theatres than New York, more bookshops than Paris and an economy that sells bicycles to Holland, exports cakes to France and ideas to the world. He sat in the mother of parliaments, and then moved downstream to run the capital as its Mayor. JOHNSON'S LIFE OF LONDON explores the cross currents of influence over the centuries between Westminster and the City, between politicians and wealth creators. For years he has researched and written about Londoners: the famous and infamous; the bizarre and bewildering, the people who made the city that made the world. In his inimitable style, he draws on a lifetime of reflections and his years of running the city, to celebrate some of the characters and characteristics which have made London what it is today. From the days when 'a bunch of pushy Italians' created Londinium, the story is told in the form of a relay race of London's particular genius and concludes that the city is set for another generation of world domination in the fields that it has now made its own . This book is full of delights and surprises. His celebration of the people who over the centuries gave the city its exciting and exuberant character, the inventors and creators who were themselves shaped by London , makes one see the city in an entirely new light . Ranging from the Romans to Dick Whittington, one of his predecessors as mayor, and on to the modern day, Boris Johnson takes us on a fascinating and exhilarating journey. |
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