Peter Ackroyd Books

Having received a cryptic message ten years after her father's sudden disappearance, a young woman asks Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery

Dorian Gray is having his picture painted by Basil Hallward, who is charmed by his looks. But when Sir Henry Wotton visits and seduces Dorian into the worship of youthful beauty with an intoxicating speech, Dorian makes a wish he will live to regret: that all the marks of age will now be reflected in the portrait rather than on Dorian’s own face. The stage is now set for a masterful tale about appearance, reality, art, life, truth, fiction and the burden of conscience. Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a lasting gem of sophisticated wit and playfulness, which brings together all the best elements of his talent in a reinterpretation of the Faustian myth.

Relates the various activites and adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club.

In October 1843, Dickens hit upon the idea of writing a story that would not only celebrate Christmas but alert people to the desperate needs of England's poor. "The Christmas Carol" was the result. "The Chimes" is a topical satire set on New Year's Eve.

The sixth and final volume in Peter Ackroyd's magnificent History of England series, taking us from the Boer War to the Millennium Dome almost a hundred years later.

'A fantasy, impossible but delicious ... an exuberance of life and wit' The Times Literary Supplement First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf's own words, a 'writer's holiday' which delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness. Edited by Brenda Lyons with an Introduction and Notes by Sandra M. Gilbert

In Colours of London Peter Ackroyd tells the history of London through the lens of colour - with specially commissioned colorised photographs from Dynamichrome that bring a lost London back to life.

Orphaned Oliver lives in a cold, grim workhouse, until the day he dares to ask for more. Escaping to London, Oliver finds new friends and thinks he has a home at last. But his troubles are only just beginning.

Revolution, 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.

"Peter Ackroyd discloses the true nature of Blake's life and art. He traces his progression from early childhood in a Dissenting household, through his apprenticeship as an engraver and his studies at the newly formed Royal Academy Schools, to his full maturity when he produced the masterpieces upon which his reputation rests - works such as Jerusalem, Milton and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, works that were as neglected during his lifetime as they are celebrated today."--BOOK JACKET. "But we also see Blake in the context of his period; we see him caught up in the Gordon Riots, excited by the French Revolution, being tried for sedition during the Napoleonic wars, attracted to various forms of spiritual radicalism and sexual magic."--BOOK JACKET. "This is the first biography to reveal the true affinities between Blake's art and his poetry; in the magnificent biographical narrative we see Blake as a Cockney visionary and a London tradesman, as a prophet and an artisan."--Jacket