The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul''s, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings.

Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar''s life and times and of the illustrious lives that touched his. It is a carefully researched factual account, but she has also employed her novelist''s skill to form an intricate whole - a life''s texture which is also an absorbing and occasionally tragic story.