The Man of Many Parts
Martin Evans talks to historian, biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd.
Peter Ackroyd is a man attracted to energy. As the visionary poet William Blake, one of his biographical subjects and an inspiration, declared in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ‘energy is eternal delight’ and Ackroyd himself has produced a formidable output. His novels include The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and Hawksmoor (1985), awarded both the Guardian Fiction award and the Whitbread Prize. He has written biographies of Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot and Thomas More and histories of both London and the Thames. He is also the author of two volumes of poetry and regularly reviews for The Times, Sunday Times and the Spectator.
Ackroyd, therefore, is one of the few people to have a reputation as a novelist, biographer and historian. He has straddled all of these fields with aplomb, producing books that are elegant, scholarly and popular.
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