Peter Ackroyd Books

Sherlock Holmes is feeling more than a little jaded and depressed when governess Mary Morstan consults him upon a curious mystery. Since her father disappeared without trace ten years ago, Mary has received annually and anonymously a valuable pearl. When she is finally requested to meet the sender she requires an escort. Holmes and Watson accompany Mary to her encounter with the stranger, who relates to them a tale of secrecy, hidden treasure and sudden death. But before long, there is more than one death to account for, and only Sherlock Holmes has the skill to detect the real villain

Songs of Innocence, and of Experience, and The Book of Thel A DIVINE IMAGE Cruelty has a human heart, And Jealousy a human face; Terror the human form divine, And Secresy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, The human form a fiery forge, The human face a furnace sealed, The human heart its hungry gorge.

The portrait which Basil Hallward painted of Dorian Gray revealed the face of an Adonis, and when he saw the finished picture of himself, the beautiful young aesthete exclaimed: "Why should it keep what I must loose?"

Charles Dickens's satirical masterpiece, "The Pickwick Papers," catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 1836-37. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens's burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors' prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, "Before ÝDickens ̈ wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick."

A Christmas Carol 'Bah! Humbug!' Mr Scrooge is a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, miserable old man. Nobody stops him in the street to say a cheery hello; nobody would dare ask him for a favour. And I hope you'd never be so foolish as to wish him a 'Merry Christmas'! Scrooge doesn't believe in Christmas, charity, kindness - or ghosts. But one cold Christmas Eve, Scrooge receives some unusual visitors who show him just how very mistaken he's been... The Chimes The second of his series of Christmas books, Charles Dickens wrote The Chimes one year after A Christmas Carol. Tackling familiar themes of redemption, social injustice and family, it is a story of hope and contemplation and is a moving festive read well worth discovering.

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.

This title is also available as a filmle as a film___

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.

This Norton Critical Edition of a Dickens favorite reprints the 1846 text, the last edition of the novel substantially revised by Dickens and the one that most clearly reflects his authorial intentions.

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.