![]() More may have coined the word, but he didn’t set out to create an actual utopia in London. ![]() Kishtainy traces More’s engagement with utopian ideals to the writer’s attachment to the Charterhouse, the old Carthusian priory in Farringdon, and to an idyllic home life with his family in his mansion in Chelsea, with its riverside garden, a “utopia-in-miniature”. ![]() From this vantage point, we get enticing glimpses and potted biographies of all sorts of intriguing characters, starting with More, whose 1516 book Utopia is read by Kishtainy as “both a mirror to and an inversion of his home town of London”. Much like Mayhew, Kishtainy (a journalist and academic) proceeds to drift, rather, above his vast subject matter, gazing on those various individuals who over many centuries, “through their theories of society and schemes for social betterment, attempted to make the city legible”. It’s certainly a great idea for a book, and it gets off to a flying start, with an exquisite little account of the journalist Henry Mayhew, author of London Labour and the London Poor, published in serial form in the 1840s, floating high above London in 1852, in a red-and-yellow-striped hot-air balloon, looking down on the city in which, in his words, there was “more virtue and more iniquity, more wealth and more want huddled together on one vast heap than in any other part of the earth”. The Infinite City, as its own title suggests, is something longer, and stranger, and rather less focused: a book about the many thinkers, dreamers, theorists and activists who have imagined London as a utopia, from Thomas More to Extinction Rebellion. Niall Kishtainy’s previous book was A Little History of Economics (2018), one of those informative summary volumes whose title pretty much summed up its contents. ![]()
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