I got this book for christmas in 2002 and have only just gotten around to reading it. Eleven house moves I've carried it around and now I finally read it only to find that its not really worth it! As a cultural history of English art its ok, but really its central premise is basically flawed. There is nothing unique about English culture, and all cultures transmit in the same way. It's not magic or in the blood or better or worse then anywhere else, and whilst he avoids being outrightly nationalistic there are hints of the mystical powers of the english countryside transmitting the magic through the soil... All of the things that he claims are English are not uniquely so, like cultural assimilation, melancholy, alliteration etc. But its well researched, I learned some stuff I didn;t know, and maybe 20 years ago I would have been simple enough that I believed the nonsense! ( )

Quicker (and infinitely more enjoyable) to read Christopher Hitchens' review of this book in The Atlantic, rather than the book itself.

Three problems, admirably summarised by Hitchens:
1. "Ackroyd's unresolved difficulty [...] is his frequent inability to identify as "English" anything that could not be attributed as well to other nations."
2. "To say, as Ackroyd airily does, that this cosmopolitanism "corresponds to the English archetype" is to say too much and prove too little."
3. "His own Albion [...] overlooks the way in which Englishness was imposed upon others [...] and in general reviews the pageant while omitting the elements of tragedy."

To compound this, the book is not particularly well written. It's full of Pseud's Corner type stuff, which - when you are straining for credulity at the point Ackroyd is trying to make (ref point 2 above) - makes for very irritating reading. ( )

An excellent choice for the student of English literature, its referents and its development. ( )

The major failing of Albion is its falling between two structual stools. It's loosely chronological and loosely thematic, so that in the early Anglo-Saxon chapters we're frequently yo-yoed far into the future, following the breadcrumb trail of some governing English trait. This is fine, but the same referents then appear again later on, when the chronological narrative has caught up, and we're in turn catapulted back into the mists of the middle ages to check back in with Langland or Julian of Norwich. So everything shows up at least twice. I'm sure this was Ackroyd's design, and it certainly reinforces his thesis that English art and thought is cyclical and there's nothing new under the sun, but I found it pretty irritating.

Another irritant is the extent to which Ackroyd's past studies dominate the book. Chatterton, Blake and Dickens are lavishly treated, but there are only passing mentions for less famous but arguably more English writers like Clare, Crabbe and Cowper. There is a chapter on "English Music" which is really just about Vaughan-Williams - Purcell and Elgar are mentioned once or twice in passing. Of course it's inevitable that a subject of such massive scope will result in an uneven book, but one has the impression that much of Albion is cobbled together out of notes and clippings left over from Ackroyd's previous research efforts. See also London, which gets a very good chapter to itself but without any explanation of how the capital has influenced the national imagination, as opposed to expressing its own.

Some excellent mini-essays that could stand alone: ghosts and the gothic, the English Bible, Samuel Johnson.

Ackroyd identifies all the big themes, albeit none of them are new - melancholy, pragmatism, the pastoral, etc etc., and as a miscellany there will be something here for everyone - but as a unified thesis it doesn't hang together. Still a fun read, though. ( )

The only book by Peter Ackroyd that I have a) not enjoyed and b) not finished. There was some interesting material in it, but it just felt poorly organized and not well analyzed either. Mountains of quotations but little real engagement with their substance. Usually I really like his work, but I could not finish this and gave it away. ( )