Venice: Hub of our world

IF he wrote about the tribulations of turnip growing or the life story of, say, Noel Dempsey, Peter Ackroyd would still produce a bestseller.

The author of a masterful history of London, and other works of originality on subjects such as Chaucer and Dickens, has a style near unparalleled, an evocative, sweeping camera of an imagination that nothing escapes.

Does anyone research as well as him? A short paragraph seems distilled from ten scholarly tomes. So what does he make out of a story crammed with historic events, with discoveries that changed society, with stories wondrous and weird, with the epic lives of great artists and great dilettantes? Is it stretching a point to say it is the story of humanity itself? Ackroyd, not given to excess, might concur.