A Horror and a BeautyPeter Ackroyds writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of Londonits rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so called London writers, this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural