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
rather like a car coming towards you. I knew I had to do it sometime. And it seemed like a natural progression from the other people I'd done.
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.
His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.
It leads to the conclusion that he did not necessarily persevere in his study.
And I think that's the spirit of Shakespeare, which somehow touched it . . . I don't know what that process is or means, but it certainly takes place.
The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
People are much more interesting than people realise.
The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.
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.
All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.
Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.
I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell.