Peter Ackroyd

Here are two thousand years of London’s history and folklore, its chroniclers and criminals and plain citizens, its food and drink and countless pleasures. Blackfriar’s and Charing Cross, Paddington and Bedlam. Westminster Abbey and St. Martin in the Fields. Cockneys and vagrants. Immigrants, peasants, and punks. The …

Hawksmoor is a 1985 novel by the English writer Peter Ackroyd. It won Best Novel at the 1985 Whitbread Awards and the Guardian Fiction Prize. It tells the parallel stories of Nicholas Dyer, who builds seven churches in 18th-century London for which he needs human sacrifices, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, detective in the …

The Clerkenwell Tales is an historical novel by English writer Peter Ackroyd, first published in 2003.

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.

Peter Ackroyd’s marvelous 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 on his own ground. Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, …