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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( A ) : Ackroyd, Peter
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For discerning bibliophiles and readers who enjoy unforgettable classic literature, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a trove of reviews covering a century of memorable writing. Each work of literature featured here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word.The featured works have been handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries, including Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others.Addictive, browsable, knowledgeable—1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die will be a boon companion for anyone who loves good writing and an inspiration for anyone who is just beginning to discover a love of books. Each entry is accompanied by an authoritative yet opinionated critical essay describing the importance and influence of the work in question. Also included are publishing history and career details about the authors, as well as reproductions of period dust jackets and book designs.
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“This magnificent evocation of all that London has meant down the centuries...I cannot begin to describe the richness with which Ackroyd pursues his theme...A blend of virtuosity and deep affection that is truly bewitching. Ackroyd has performed a noble public service in preserving in these pages so many centuries of marvels, and secrecies.”
–Jan Morris
London: The Biography is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction.
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 wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.
London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”
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Charles Dickens's masterpiece about prison life is set in an English debtors' prison (where Dickens's own father had been imprisoned) and where Amy Dorrit, the heroine, has spent her entire life caring for her imprisoned father. The novel portrays both the physical and psychological horrors of imprisonment and the hypocrisy of a society that allows them to continue. Line drawings.
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Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry, the animals, even the flowers–that would appear in Shakespeare’s plays. He takes us through Shakespeare’s London neighborhood and the fertile, competitive theater world where he worked as actor and writer. He shows us Shakespeare as a businessman, and as a constant reviser of his writing. In joining these intimate details with profound intuitions about the playwright and his work, Ackroyd has produced an altogether engaging masterpiece.
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Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: The Biography with a book that once again plumbs the history of England and uncovers the continuities that link past and present. A dazzling, highly original exploration of English culture from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, ALBION demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality imbues every form of cultural expression—not just literature, but also painting, music, architecture, philosophy, and science.
In an intricate, expertly crafted mixture of narrative and theme, Ackroyd travels through time and across cultural categories as he seeks out the roots and the essence of the English imagination. With an irrepressible curiosity and contagious enthusiasm, he moves from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, Hogarth to Hockney, Purcell to Vaughan Williams, Inigo Jones to Edward Lutyens. His lively biographical sketches and incisive exegeses of the work of figures both well known and less familiar deepen our understanding and appreciation of our inherited culture. Like London: The Biography, ALBION contains unexpected treasures, including a thought-provoking look at immigration and assimilation and a delightful digression into the English obsession with gardening. Black-and-white photographs and drawings, and two lavish four-color inserts add visual appeal throughout.
Ackroyd’s talent for distilling information and presenting it with novelistic flair shines on every page of ALBION. It is Peter Ackroyd at his most brilliant and exuberant.
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This special abridged edition takes the reader into the fascinating life of one of the world's greatest writers--Dickens' penurious and painful childhood, the triumphant reception of his first novel and other significant events in Dickens' life.
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Compiled by Charles Dickens, and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins among its contributors, this rediscovered work is an ingenious collaborative tale of the supernatural with indelible touches of pure Dickensian comedy. When the narrator spies a deserted house from his railway carriage, he determines to take up residence. But local legend has it that this is a haunted house, and no servant will dare enter employment. Refusing to be thwarted, he instead invites a number of acquaintances to join him, commissioning each with the task of routing out any supernatural inhabitants. As they gather together on twelfth night, each recounts his version of the ghostly activities.
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Heinrich Obermann, a celebrated German archaeologist, has uncovered the ancient ruins of Troy on a Turkish hillside. He fervently believes that his discovery will prove that the heroes of the Iliad, a work he has cherished all his life, actually existed. Sophia, Obermann’s young Greek wife, works at the site carefully preserving the ancient treasures she uncovers. But Sophia soon comes to see another side of her husband. He is mysteriously vague about his past and the wife he claims died years before. When she finds a cache of artefacts Obermann has hidden away, her suspicions about him rise, feelings that escalate when a visiting archaeologist who questions Obermann’s methods dies from a mysterious fever. The arrival of a second, equally sceptical archaeologist brings Sophia’s doubts to a head—and spurs Obermann to make even greater claims about the evidence he has found and the profound importance of his achievements.
In The Fall of Troy, Peter Ackroyd again demonstrates his ability to evoke time and place, and to transform history into compelling fiction. Like the Homeric epics that entrance Obermann, The Fall of Troy is in part accurate, in part fantastic. It is a brilliantly told story of heroes and scoundrels, human aspirations and follies, and the temptation to shape the truth to fit a passionately held belief.
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When Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that white light was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678, Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planets and published Principia, a milestone in the history of science, which set forth his famous laws of motion and universal gravitation. Newton’s long-time research on calculus, finally made public in 1704, triggered a heated controversy as European scientists accused him of plagiarizing the work of the German scientist Gottfried Leibniz.
In this third volume in the acclaimed Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series, bestselling author Peter Ackroyd provides an engaging portrait of Isaac Newton, illuminating what we think we know about him and describing his seminal contributions to science and mathematics.
A man of wide and eclectic interests, Newton blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his determination to interpret a modern universe as a mathematical universe.
By brining vividly to life a somewhat puritanical man whose desire to experiment and explore bordered on the obsessive, Peter Ackroyd demonstrates the unique brilliance of Newton’s perceptions, which changed our understanding of the world.
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From the author of Chatterton and Shakespeare: A Biography comes a gripping novel set in London that re-imagines an infamous 19th-century Shakespeare forgery.
Charles and Mary Lamb, who will in time achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for Children, are still living at home, caring for their dotty and maddening parents. Reading Shakespeare is the siblings’ favorite reprieve, and they are delighted when an ambitious young bookseller comes into their lives claiming to possess a ‘lost’ Shakespearea play. Soon all of London is eagerly anticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the play not knowing that they have all been duped by charlatan and a fraud.
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From the foremost contemporary chronicler of London’s history, a suspenseful novel that ingeniously draws on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to recreate the city’s 14th century religious and political intrigues.
London, 1399. Sister Clarice, a nun born below Clerkenwell convent, is predicting the death of King Richard II and the demise of the Church. Her visions can be dismissed as madness, until she accurately foretells a series of terrorist explosions. What is the role of the apocalyptic Predestined Men? And the clandestine Dominus? And what powers, ultimately, will prevail?
In Peter Ackroyd’s deft and suprising narrative, The Miller, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath and other characters from Canterbury Tales pursue these mysteries through a pungently vivid medieval London.
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A literary star returns with an addictive tale of murder in Victorian London. Peter Ackroyd is "our most exciting and original writer... one of the few English writers of his generation who will be read in a hundred years' time." -- The Sunday Times (London) The Trial Of Elizabeth Cree is without a doubt Peter Ackroyd's breakout book. It has all the erudition and literary brilliance we expect of Ackroyd, yet it is as vivid, scary, and spellbinding as the best of Edgar Allan Poe. 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 sounds of the English music halls, smell the smells of London slums, hear the hooves of horses on the cobblestone streets, and attend the trial of Elizabeth Cree, a woman accused of poisoning her husband but who may be the one person who knows the truth about the murders. The wonderfully rhythmic shifting of focus from trial to back alleys, where we come upon George Gissing, author of New Grub Street, and even Karl Marx, gives the story a tremendous depth and resonance beyond its page-turning thriller plot. In The Trial Of Elizabeth Cree, Peter Ackroyd has once again confirmed his place as one of the great writers of our time.
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In this stunning new illustrated biography, Peter Ackroyd introduces us to the public and private life of one of Britain's best loved literary giants, Charles Dickens.
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Widely hailed on its first publication in 1951, this authoritative guide has long been established as one of the most esteemed and influential editions of Shakespeare's works. This edition includes: the recognized canon of Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and poems; a new introduction; a brief biography of Shakespeare; an introduction to Shakespearian theater; a glossary of 2,500 words and phrases; line numbering that relates to the standard concordances; and a new selection of Shakespearian websites, organized by theme.
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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 Peter Ackroyd's brilliant novel. In today's London, a young poet and an elderly novelist engage the mystery of Chatterton by trying to decode the clues found in an old manuscript, only to discover that their investigation discloses other riddles for which there are no solutions. Chatterton is at once a hilariously witty comedy; a thoughtful and dramatic exploration of the deepest issues of authenticity in both life and art; and a subtle and touching story of failed lives, parental love, doomed marriages, and erotic passions.