Penguin Classics, 2010. — 464 p. — ISBN: 0143106171 (ISBN13: 9780143106173) Renowned novelist, historian, and biographer Peter Ackroyd takes on what is arguably the greatest poem in the English language and presents it in a prose vernacular that makes it accessible to readers while preserving the spirit of the original. A mirror for medieval society, 'The Canterbury Tales'...
With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with an inspired look into the heart and the history of the English imagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what...
Nan A. Talese, 2014. — 304 p. — ISBN: 0385537379 (ISBN13: 9780385537377) A brief yet definitive new biography of one of film's greatest legends: perfect for readers who want to know more about the iconic star but who don't want to commit to a lengthy work. He was the very first icon of the silver screen and is one of the most recognizable of Hollywood faces, even a hundred...
Grove Press, 1996. — 234 p. — ISBN: 0802134807 (ISBN13: 9780802134806) Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), apparently a suicide at 18, posthumously astonished literary England when he was revealed as the author of a sequence of famous and influential "medieval" poems he claimed to have discovered. An authentic talent as well as a literary counterfeiter, he is the guiding spirit of...
Frances Lincoln, 2022. — 436 p. — ISBN 978-0-7112-8152-3 Think of the colors of London and what do you imagine? The reds of open-top buses and terracotta bricks? The grey smog of Victorian industry, Portland stone, and pigeons in Trafalgar square? Or the gradations of yellows, violets, and blues that shimmer on the Thames at sunset—reflecting the incandescent light of a city...
In the aftermath of the great fire, eighteenth-century London is a city of extremes. Squalor and superstition vie with elegance and reason as brilliant architect, Nicholas Dyer, is commissioned to build seven new churches. They are to stand as beacons of the Enlightenment – but Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each one.
Two hundred and fifty years later, in...
In the aftermath of the great fire, eighteenth-century London is a city of extremes. Squalor and superstition vie with elegance and reason as brilliant architect, Nicholas Dyer, is commissioned to build seven new churches. They are to stand as beacons of the Enlightenment – but Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each one.
Two hundred and fifty years later, in...
Nan A. Talese, 2007. — 192 p. — ISBN: 0307423654 (ISBN13: 9780307423658) In this second volume in the Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series, bestselling author Peter Ackroyd brings us a man of humble beginnings, crude manners, and prodigious talents, the nineteenth-century painter J. M. W. Turner. Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London in 1775. His father was a barber, and his...
Nan A. Talese, 2011. — 240 p. — ISBN 9780385531511, 0385531516. In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface. There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the...
Nan A. Talese, 2011. — 240 p. — ISBN 9780385531511, 0385531516. In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface. There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the...
Nan A. Talese , 2011 – 240 p. – ISBN 9780385531511, 0385531516 In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface. There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the...
Anchor Books, 2003. — 801 p. — ISBN: 0385497717 (ISBN13: 9780385497718) Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and...
The image of London as a human body is striking and singular; we may trace it from the pictorial emblems of the City of God, the mystical body in which Jesus Christ represents its head and the citizens its other members. London has also been envisaged in the form of a voting man with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation; the figure is taken from a Roman bronze but it...
Gothic, mysterious, theatrical, fatally flawed, and dazzling, the life of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s greatest and most versatile writers, is the ideal subject for Peter Ackroyd. Poe wrote lyrical poetry and macabre psychological melodramas; invented the first fictional detective; and produced pioneering works of science fiction and fantasy. His innovative style, images,...
Vintage Digital, 2017. — 247 p. — ISBN: 1448191394 (ISBN13: 9781448191390) In Queer City Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population. In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with...
Peter Ackroyd's marvellous biography is a living attempt to reach into the heart of Shakespeare. He creates an intimate and immediate connection with his subject, so that the book reads like the work of a contemporary - meeting Shakespeare afresh on his own ground. Written with an intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, this is a book by a writer about a writer, and a...
In this perfect companion to London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history, describing the river’s endless allure in a journey overflowing with characters, incidents, and wry observations. Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the...
Ackroyd's retelling of Chaucer's classic isn't exactly like the Ethan Hawke'd film version of Hamlet, but it's not altogether different, either. Noting in his introduction that the source material is as close to a contemporary novel as Wells Cathedral is to an apartment block, Ackroyd translates the original verse into clean and enjoyable prose that clears up the roadblocks...
Peter Ackroyd's imagination dazzles in this brilliant novel written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein himself. Mary Shelley and Shelley are characters in the novel.
It was at Oxford that I first met Bysshe. We arrived at our college on the same day; confusing to a mere foreigner, it is called University College. I had seen him from my window and had been struck by his auburn...
Chatto Windus, 2008. — 304 p. — ISBN: 0701182954 (ISBN13: 9780701182953) Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn in the secluded village of Headington, near Oxford. The coroner's office in Clarendon Street provides corpses - but they have often died of violence and drowning: they are damaged and putrifying. Victor moves his coils and jars and electrical...
Penguin Books, 2010. 316 pages
An immortal story of love, adventure, chivalry, treachery and death brought to new life for our times. The legend of King Arthur has retained its appeal and popularity through the ages - Mordred's treason, the knightly exploits of Tristan, Lancelot's fatally divided loyalties and his love for Guenever, the quest for the Holy Grail.
Anchor, 2008. — 224 p. — ISBN: 030738649X (ISBN13: 9780307386496) In The Fall of Troy, acclaimed novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd creates a fascinating narrative that follows an archaeologist's obsession with finding the ruins of Troy, depicting the blurred line between truth and deception.Obermann, an acclaimed German scholar, fervently believes that his discovery of the...
Pan Books, 2012. — 500 p. — ISBN: 0330544284 (ISBN13: 9780330544283) Peter Ackroyd, whose work has always been underpinned by a profound interest in and understanding of England’s history, now tells the epic story of England itself. In Foundation, the chronicler of London and of its river, the Thames, takes us from the primeval forests of England’s prehistory to the death, in...
Macmillan, 2012. — 507 p. — ISBN: 0230706401; ISBN13: 9780230706408. Rich in detail and atmosphere and told in vivid prose, Tudors recounts the transformation of England from a settled Catholic country to a Protestant superpower. It is the story of Henry VIII's cataclysmic break with Rome, and his relentless pursuit of both the perfect wife and the perfect heir; of how the...
Macmillan, 2014. — 502 p. — ISBN: 023070641X (ISBN13: 9780230706415) In this book, Peter Ackroyd has captured the period as only he can. From the accession of the thrillingly unappealing James VI & I, who though rather ghastly, was also extraordinarily eloquent, to his hapless heir, Charles I, whose taste in art was peerless, but whose political judgment was so fatally poor, to...
Thomas Dunne Books, 2014. — 502 p. — ISBN: 1250003636 (ISBN13: 9781250003638) Peter Ackroyd has been praised as one of the greatest living chroniclers of Britain and its people. In Rebellion, he continues his dazzling account of the history of England, beginning with the progress south of the Scottish king, James VI, who on the death of Elizabeth I became the first Stuart king...
Macmillan, 2017. — 403 p. — ISBN: 0230706428 (ISBN13: 9780230706422) The fourth volume of Peter Ackroyd's enthralling History of England begins in 1688 with a revolution and ends in 1815 with a famous victory. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead...
Macmillan, 2018. — 416 p. — ISBN: 150988002X (ISBN13: 9781509880027) Dominion, the fifth volume of Peter Ackroyd’s masterful History of England, begins in 1815 as national glory following the Battle of Waterloo gives way to a post-war depression and ends with the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. Spanning the end of the Regency, Ackroyd takes readers from the accession...
This novel centers on the famous 16th-century alchemist and astrologer John Dee. Reputedly a black magician, he was imprisoned by Queen Mary for allegedly attempting to kill her through sorcery. When Matthew Palmer inherits an old house in Clerkenwell, he feels that he has become part of its past.
This novel centres on the famous 16th-century alchemist and astrologer John Dee. Reputedly a black magician, he was imprisoned by Queen Mary for allegedly attempting to kill her through sorcery. When Matthew Palmer inherits an old house in Clerkenwell, he feels that he has become part of its past.
Nan A. Talese, 2006. — 213 p. — ISBN: 0385514611 (ISBN13: 9780385514613) Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity: her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile. The great solace of her life is her brother Charles, an aspiring writer. It is no surprise when Mary falls for the bookseller’s son, antiquarian William Ireland, from whom Charles has...
Anchor, 1999. — 480 p. — ISBN: 0385496931 (ISBN13: 9780385496933) Peter Ackroyd's The Life of Thomas More is a masterful reconstruction of the life and imagination of one of the most remarkable figures of history. Thomas More (1478-1535) was a renowned statesman; the author of a political fantasy that gave a name to a literary genre and a worldview (Utopia); and, most famously,...
Nan A. Talese, 2012. — 261 p. — ISBN: 0307816230 (ISBN13: 9780307816238) The year is 1880, the setting London's poor and dangerous Limehouse district, home to immigrants and criminals. A series of brutal murders has occurred, and, as Ackroyd leads us down London's dark streets, the sense of time and place becomes overwhelmingly immediate and real. We experience the sights and...
Anchor, 2001. — 192 p. — ISBN: 0385497695 (ISBN13: 9780385497695) From the imagination of one of the most brilliant writers of our time and bestselling author of The Life of Thomas More, a novel that playfully imagines how the "modern" era might appear to a thinker seventeen centuries hence. At the turn of the 38th century, London's greatest orator, Plato, is known for his...
Nan A. Talese, 1995. — 261 p. — ISBN: 0385477074 (ISBN13: 9780385477079) The year is 1880, the setting London's poor and dangerous Limehouse district, home to immigrants and criminals. A series of brutal murders has occurred, and, as Ackroyd leads us down London's dark streets, the sense of time and place becomes overwhelmingly immediate and real. We experience the sights and...
Nan A. Talese, 2014. — 256 p. — ISBN: 0385538618 (ISBN13: 9780385538619) Rapier-sharp, witty, intriguing, and mysterious: a new novel from Peter Ackroyd set in the London of the 1960s. 'Three Brothers' follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel, and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy...
With Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd is at his most magical and magisterial, presenting a glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of the ultimate city. Ackroyd provides a history of and meditation on the actual and imaginary Venice in a volume as opulent and paradoxical as the city itself...How Ackroyd deftly catalogues the overabundance of the city’s real...
Nan A. Talese, 2015. — 255 p. — ISBN: 0385537395 (ISBN13: 9780385537391) Ackroyd at his best - gripping short life of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of 'The Moonstone' and 'The Woman in White'. Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great...
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