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Albion, The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd
Vintage
Reviewed by Mike Bowler (Courtesy Taranaki Daily News)

An author of novels and non-fiction, Ackroyd's recent London: The Biography was a best seller. He should make the most of that success and last year's award of the CBE for services to literature, because this work will have more limited interest.

Despite the blurb's use of "masterpiece" and "dazzling acrobatic display of literary omniscience", this is a challenging work for the average reader.

The ideas are meaty and the language tends towards the technical (a damned thick dictionary will be needed by all but those with the most extensive vocabulary of religious and artistic terms).

Albion examines the English imagination – the people, things and places that sparked the ideas behind England's art – literature, music and architecture.

In the introduction, Ackroyd sums it up well with an idea from turn-of-the-20th-century writer Ford Madox Ford. It's an idea that will resonate with anyone who has read Michael King's Being Pakeha Now.

Ford believed that it was absurd to use the word "race" about the English. "It is not – the whole of Anglo Saxondom – a matter of race but one, quite simply, of place – of place and spirit, the spirit of being born of the environment."

Albion is Being Pakeha writ large – much more ground to cover and much more commitment to do so.