Books by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd's method is to position Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, he not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background.

Thomas Gradgrind is a cold and industrious man obsessed with facts, statistics and practicality. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy, never allowing them to engage in what he considers to be fanciful pursuits. But when Louisa is forced into... a loveless marriage to the much older, she and Tom must risk anger.
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The poet John Milton is transposed to the New World, where he has travelled to flee the tyranny of the Old. His adventures with his amanuensis, Goosequill, are by turns picaresque and delightful. However, Paradise Found will ultimately be lost in the most appalling and bloody cir...cumstances.
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The second volume of Peter Ackroyd's masterful history of England: the Tudors

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.
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