Peter Ackroyd: 40 books

Alfred Hitchcock rigorously controlled his public image, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring out all others. In this gripping short biography, Peter Ackroyd wrests the director’s chair back from the master of control to reveal a lugubriously jolly...

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...

Loved and hated in equal measure, London was for centuries the world's greatest city. Its streets, teeming with history, have always worn a variety of influences, reflecting the diverse crowds who have walked them. Its citizens have witnessed everything from pilgrimages, celebrations, acts of heroism...

Las anécdotas que dieron origen a la leyenda de Isaac Newton son innumerables: algunas son apócrifas, otras son en realidad hagiográficas y unas más son simplemente fabulosas; todas ellas provienen de sus contemporáneos, quienes lo ensalzaron, y de los siglos XVIII y XIX, cuando se le consideró...

From the foremost contemporary chronicler of London’s history, a suspenseful novel that ingeniously draws on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Talesto recreate the city’s 14th century religious and political intrigues. London, 1399. Sister Clarice, a nun born below Clerkenwell convent, is predicting...

David Wright's prose version of Chaucer's classic.

Following on from Foundation, Tudors is the second volume in Peter Ackroyd's astonishing series, The History of England. 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...

A New York Times Notable Book and Providence Journal Best Book of the Year From the incomparable Peter Ackroyd: a brilliant re-imagination of the classic tale that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries.   Victor Frankenstein, a researcher, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley form an...

Il romanzo della vita di Shakespeare: così può essere definita questa monumentale biografia che penetra così a fondo nel mondo e nelle vicende più salienti dell’esistenza del genio inglese da apparire più come l’opera di un scrittore coevo che quella di un biografo del ventunesimo secolo....

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK 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....

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,...

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,...