What a shocking bad hat! 
Christopher Tayler
Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem’.
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Other articles by this contributor:
But Little Bequalmed · Louis de Bernières’s Decency
High on His Own Supply · Amis Recycled
Genderbait for the Nerds · William Gibson
A Bit of a Lush · William Boyd
Belgravia Cockney · being a le Carré bore
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