Books by Peter Ackroyd

What if John Milton, Cromwell's secretary, anticipating the King's return to London, had decided to flee England in order to avoid imprisonment or death? What if he had crossed the ocean and joined the Puritans recently settled in New England? From this idea Peter Ackroyd creates an enthralling story of conflict, treachery, hypocrisy and greed.

The scene is London, in 1399. The streets of London are rife with rumour, heresy, espionage and murder and at the centre of the confusion is the nun, Sister Clarice, who has been vouchsafed visions of the future. As one critic has put it, 'he is our age's greatest London imagination'.

Highly original and magnificent in scope, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination discovers the roots of English cultural history in the Anglo-Saxon period, and traces it through the centuries.

Offers a biography of Shakespeare, this book reads like the work of a contemporary meeting Shakespeare. It is a depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited.

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.

Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity: her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile.