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
I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.
Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.
Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.
The best years are when you know what you're doing.
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.