'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades. A century of enormous change, encompassing two world wars, four monarchs (Edward VII, George V, George VI and the Queen), the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the Labour Party, women's suffrage, the birth of the NHS, the march of suburbia and the clearance of the slums. It was a period that saw the work of the Bloomsbury Group and T. S. Eliot, of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, of the end of the post-war slump to the technicolour explosion of the 1960s, to free love and punk rock and from Thatcher to Blair. A vividly readable, richly peopled tour de force, it is Peter Ackroyd writing at his considerable best.

Celebrated novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd paints a vivid picture of one of the world's greatest cities in this brilliant and original work, exploring how the city's many hues have come to shape its history and identity. Think of the colours 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 that never truly goes dark? We associate green with royal parks and the District Line; gold with royal carriages, the Golden Lane Estate, and the tops of monuments and cathedrals. Colours of London shows us that colour is everywhere in the city, and each one holds myriad links to its past. The colours of London have inspired artists (Whistler, Van Gogh, Turner, Monet), designers (Harry Beck) and social reformers (Charles Booth). And from the city's first origins, Ackroyd shows how colour is always to be found at the heart of London's history, from the blazing reds of the Great Fire of London to the blackouts of the Blitz to the bold colours of royal celebrations and vibrant street life. This beautifully written book examines the city's fascinating relationship with colour, alongside specially commissioned colourized photographs from Dynamichrome, which bring a lost London back to life. London has been the main character in Ackroyd's work ever since his first novel, and he has won countless prizes in both fiction and non-fiction for his truly remarkable body of work. Here, he channels a lifetime of knowledge of the great city, writing with clarity and passion about the hues and shades which have shaped London's journey through history into the present day. A truly invaluable book for lovers of art, history, photography or urban geography, this beautifully illustrated title tells a rich and fascinating story of the history of this great and ever-changing city.

The English Actor charts the uniquely English approach to stagecraft. In thirty chapters, Peter Ackroyd describes, with superb narrative skill, the genesis of acting – deriving from the Church tradition of Mystery Plays – through the flourishing of the craft in the Renaissance to modern methods that followed the advent of film and television. The biographies of the most notable and celebrated actors are also explored, right up to the present day. In this book, Ackroyd gives us an original and superbly entertaining appraisal of how actors have acted – and how audiences have responded – since the medieval period, and what we mean by the ‘magic of the stage’.

Revolution, 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 of his mad father, George III, and England was - again - at war with France, a war that would end with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.

Late Stuart and Georgian England marked the creation of the great pillars of the English state. The Bank of England was founded, as was the stock exchange, the Church of England was fully established as the guardian of the spiritual life of the nation and parliament became the sovereign body of the nation with responsibilities and duties far beyond those of the monarch. It was a revolutionary era in English letters, too, a time in which newspapers first flourished and the English novel was born. It was an era in which coffee houses and playhouses boomed, gin flowed freely and in which shops, as we know them today, began to proliferate in our towns and villages. But it was also a time of extraordinary and unprecedented technological innovation, which saw England utterly and irrevocably transformed from a country of blue skies and farmland to one of soot and steel and coal.

All over the world there are places that became famous forever because something extraordinary happened there by chance. Beautifully illustrated and carefully researched Fame By Chance covers 380 such places with new insights and facts that are amusing, surprising and sometimes controversial. Foreword by Peter Ackroyd. All over the world there are places that became famous forever by chance - battles briefly waged, scenes of triumph and disater, sites of murder and intrigue, centres of influential creativity and noted mythical places from books and film. How and why did; Angora, Tabasco, Duffel and Fray Bentos give us products good and bad; Kohima's tennis court save India; Storyville's 269 brothels helped it to create jaz; Botany Bay never saw any British convicts; Tay Bridge was a disaster avoided by Marx and Engels; 'OK' stands for a farmhouse; Ferrari chose the 'Prancing Horse of Maranello'; Kyoto was saved from Hiroshoma's terrible fate; The British built the Great Hedge of India; With 432 pages beautifully illustrated and carefully researched Fame By Chance covers 380 such places with new insights and facts that are amusing, surprising and sometimes controversial.

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent

The penultimate volume of Peter Ackroyd’s masterful History of England series, Dominion begins in 1815 as national glory following the Battle of Waterloo gives way to post-war depression, spanning the last years of the Regency to the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901.

In it, Ackroyd takes us from the accession of the profligate George IV whose government was steered by Lord Liverpool, who was firmly set against reform, to the reign of his brother, William IV, the 'Sailor King', whose reign saw the modernization of the political system and the abolition of slavery.

But it was the accession of Queen Victoria, aged only eighteen, that sparked an era of enormous innovation. Technological progress – from steam railways to the first telegram – swept the nation and the finest inventions were showcased at the first Great Exhibition in 1851. The emergence of the middle classes changed the shape of society and scientific advances changed the old pieties of the Church of England, and spread secular ideas across the nation. But though intense industrialization brought boom times for the factory owners, the working classes were still subjected to poor housing, long working hours and dire poverty.

It was a time that saw a flowering of great literature, too. As the Georgian era gave way to that of Victoria, readers could delight not only in the work of Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth but also the great nineteenth-century novelists: the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray, and, of course, Dickens, whose work has become synonymous with Victorian England.

Nor was Victorian expansionism confined to Britain alone. By the end of Victoria’s reign, the Queen was also an Empress and the British Empire dominated much of the globe. And, as Ackroyd shows in this richly populated, vividly told account, Britannia really did seem to rule the waves.

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 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 brief reign of the teenage king, Edward VI, gave way to the violent reimposition of Catholicism and the stench of bonfires under 'Bloody Mary'. It tells, too, of the long reign of Elizabeth I, which, though marked by civil strife, plots against the queen and even an invasion force, finally brought stability. Above all, however, it is the story of the English Reformation and the making of the Anglican Church. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, England was still largely feudal and looked to Rome for direction; at its end, it was a country where good governance was the duty of the state, not the church, and where men and women began to look to themselves for answers rather than to those who ruled them.

Rapier-sharp, witty, intriguing and mysterious: a new novel from Peter Ackroyd, set in 1960s London.
"Three Brothers" follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, born on a post-war council estate in Camden Town. Marked out from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world -- a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, back-biters and petty thieves.
London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, reinforcing Ackroyd's grand theme that place and history create, surround and engulf us. From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs. Everything is possible -- not only in the new freedom of the 1960s but also in London's timeless past.

Having written enthralling biographies of London and of its great river, the Thames, Peter Ackroyd now turns to England itself. This first volume of six takes us from the time that England was first settled, more than 15,000 years ago, to the death in 1509 of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. In Foundation, Ackroyd takes us from Neolithic England, which we can only see in the most tantalizing glimpses - a stirrup found in a grave, some seeds at the bottom of a bowl - to the long period of Roman rule; from the Dark Ages when England was invaded by a ceaseless tide of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, to the twin glories of medieval England - its great churches and monasteries and its common law. With his extraordinary skill for evoking time and place, he tells the familiar story of king succeeding king in rich prose, with profound insight and some surprising details. The food we ate, the clothes we wore, the punishments we endured, even the jokes we told are all found here, too.

In Civil War, Peter Ackroyd continues his dazzling account of England's history, beginning with the progress south of the Scottish king, James VI, who on the death of Elizabeth I became the first Stuart king of England, and ends with the deposition and flight into exile of his grandson, James II. The Stuart dynasty brought together the two nations of England and Scotland into one realm, albeit a realm still marked by political divisions that echo to this day. More importantly, perhaps, the Stuart era was marked by the cruel depredations of civil war, and the killing of a king. Ackroyd paints a vivid portrait of James I and his heirs. Shrewd and opinionated, the new King was eloquent on matters as diverse as theology, witchcraft and the abuses of tobacco, but his attitude to the English parliament sowed the seeds of the division that would split the country in the reign of his hapless heir, Charles I. Ackroyd offers a brilliant - warts and all - portrayal of Charles's nemesis Oliver Cromwell, Parliament's great military leader and England's only dictator, who began his career as a political liberator but ended it as much of a despot as 'that man of blood', the king he executed. England's turbulent seventeenth century is vividly laid out before us, but so too is the cultural and social life of the period, notable for its extraordinarily rich literature, including Shakespeare's late masterpieces, Jacobean tragedy, the poetry of John Donne and Milton and Thomas Hobbes' great philosophical treatise, Leviathan. Civil War also gives us a very real sense of the lives of ordinary English men and women, lived out against a backdrop of constant disruption and uncertainty.

This is the only available edition of a brilliant novel by the leading Restoration dramatist and author of The Way of the World. Masked balls, mistaken identity, and fanciful deceits run riot in this hilarious tale of love and intrigue by the master of the Restoration comedy. Returning to Florence on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday, Aurelian - together with his sworn companion Hippolito - dons his disguise in anticipation of the famous Florentine ball. Once there, the two are soon separated, and each finds himself paired off with a beautiful - and masked - woman. Whilst Aurelian yearns to learn the true identity of his 'love', Hippolito is mistaken for another and brazenly plays along with the conceit. Chaos abounds as masks are dropped, truth revealed, and, somehow, all ends happily.

The English Actor charts the uniquely English approach to stagecraft. In thirty chapters, Peter Ackroyd describes, with superb narrative skill, the genesis of acting - deriving from the Church tradition of Mystery Plays - through the flourishing of the craft in the Renaissance to modern methods that followed the advent of film and television. The biographies of the most notable and celebrated actors are also explored, right up to the present day. In this book, Ackroyd gives us an original and superbly entertaining appraisal of how actors have acted - and how audiences have responded - since the medieval period, and what we mean by the 'magic of the stage'.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare contains the recognized canon of the bard’s plays, and his sonnets and poems. The texts were edited by the late Professor Peter Alexander, making it one of the most authoritative editions, recognized the world over for its clarity and scholarship. Described in the Guardian on its first publication in 1951 as ‘a symbol in the history of our national culture’, the Collins edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by the late Professor Peter Alexander, has long been established as one of the most authoritative editions of Shakespeare’s works, and was chosen by the BBC as the basis for its televised cycle of the plays. The book starts with two specially written articles – a biography of Shakespeare by Germaine Greer and a wide-ranging introduction to Shakespeare theatre by the late Anthony Burgess. Each play is also introduced by academics from Glasgow University, where Professor Alexander undertook his editing. New to this edition is an internet resources section, providing details of the most useful Shakespeare websites. In addition, the invaluable glossary of over 2,500 entries explaining the meaning of obsolete words and phrases (complete with line references) has been expanded and redesigned to make it much easier to use.

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades. A century of enormous change, encompassing two world wars, four monarchs (Edward VII, George V, George VI and the Queen), the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the Labour Party, women's suffrage, the birth of the NHS, the march of suburbia and the clearance of the slums. It was a period that saw the work of the Bloomsbury Group and T. S. Eliot, of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, of the end of the post-war slump to the technicolour explosion of the 1960s, to free love and punk rock and from Thatcher to Blair. A vividly readable, richly peopled tour de force, Innovation is Peter Ackroyd writing at his considerable best.

NOW AN UNMISSABLE FILM STARRING BILL NIGHY, DOUGLAS BOOTH AND OLIVIA COOKE. 'Mesmerising, macabre and totally brilliant' Daily Mail Before the Ripper, fear had another name. London, 1880. A series of gruesome murders attributed to the mysterious 'Limehouse Golem' strikes fear into the heart of the capital. Inspector John Kildare must track down this brutal serial killer in the damp, dark alleyways of riverside London. But how does Dan Leno, music hall star extraordinaire, find himself implicated in this crime spree, and what does Elizabeth Cree, on trial for the murder of her husband, have to hide? Peter Ackroyd brings Victorian London to life in all its guts and glory, as we travel from the glamour of the music hall to the slums of the East End, meeting George Gissing and Karl Marx along the way.

'Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts' Simon Callow, Guardian In this powerful Sunday Times bestseller 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 his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS. Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

Making a major part of England's literary heritage accessible to a new audience, Peter Ackroyd's The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling renders Geoffrey Chaucer's timeless tales in lucid, compelling modern English prose, with illustrations by Nick Bantock in Penguin Classics. On a pilgrimage to Canterbury, a group of travellers agree to a storytelling competition. As they make their way on the road, they drink, laugh, flirt, argue and try to outdo each other with their tales. From the exuberant Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend to the Miller's worldly, ribald farce, these tales can be taken as a mirror of fourteenth-century London. Incorporating every style of medieval narrative - bawdy anecdote, allegorical fable and courtly romance - the tales encompass a blend of universal human themes, retold here for our times by bestselling author Peter Ackroyd. The edition also includes an introduction by Ackroyd, detailing some of the historical background to Chaucer and the Tales, and why he has been inspired to translate them for a new generation of readers. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, courtier and diplomat, best known as the author of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is credited as being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language. The first poet to have been buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, his other works include The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde and The Book of the Duchess. Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949) is an award-winning writer and historian. Formerly literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, he is the author of novels such as Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), as well as non-fiction including Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion (2002), London: The Biography (2000), and Thames: Sacred River (2007). 'Ackroyd's retelling is compulsive, bold and rare ... as fresh as new paint' Observer 'The only version to read' Time Out

"A romp for the ages" ("Vanity Fair")-now with a graphic cover and deluxe packaging
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" concerns a motley group of pilgrims who meet in a London inn on their way to Canterbury and agree to take part in a storytelling competition. Ackroyd's contemporary prose emphasizes the humanity of these characters-as well as explicitly rendering their bawdy humor-yet still masterfully evokes the euphonies and harmonies of Chaucer's verse.

Two apparently harmless women reside in cottages one building apart in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne. Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, cousins, have put their pasts behind them and settled into conventional country life. But when a mysterious foreigner, Theodore Cadmus - from Caldera, a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of - moves into the middle cottage, the safe monotony of their lives is shattered. The fates of the two cousins and Mr Cadmus, and those of Little Camborne and Caldera, become inextricably enmeshed. Long-hidden secrets and long-held grudges threaten to surface, drawing all into a vortex of subterfuge, theft, violence, mayhem . . . and murder.

‘And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the Soul of the Plot’

This selection of Poe’s critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In the Tell Tale Heart, a murderer’s insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and the Cask of Amontillado explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. These works display Poe’s startling ability to build suspense with almost nightmarish intensity.

David Galloway’s introduction re-examines the myths surrounding Poe’s life and reputation. This edition includes a new chronology and further reading by Tatiana Rapatzikou.

Originally published under the title Selected Writings

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 Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz. London at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather. In well-chosen anecdotes, keen observations, and the words of hundreds of its citizens and visitors, Ackroyd reveals the ingenuity and grit and vitality of London. Through a unique thematic tour of the physical city and its inimitable soul, the city comes alive.

'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . 'Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed' Independent on Sunday Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London.