Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd, CBE, FRSLis an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices and the...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth5 October 1949
It leads to the conclusion that he did not necessarily persevere in his study.
When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.
To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.
Freud was just a novelist.
As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.
I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.
In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.
Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism.