I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
Peter AckroydLondon' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.
Peter Ackroyd