In a magnificent feat of re-creating sixteenth-century London and Stratford, best-selling biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd brings William Shakespeare to life in the manner of a contemporary rather than a biographer. Following his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement with this definitive and imaginative biographical masterpiece.
(Cover image for the unabridged Novel, Casette cover unavailable)
Victorian London, in all its awful, teeming, endless variety, with its dark alleyways peopled by criminals, beggars and children, its unbreathable air, its pea-soup smog, its carriages rattling along streets lined with prostitutes, its weary laborers filing out for a pint at the end of a mind-numbing day, its warm, smoke-filled theaters, its cool, airy, quiet museum library, its actors, its murderers, its writers, its intellectuals -- all of this erupts from Mr. Ackroyd's overheated imagination with the hectic, insistent reality of a nightmare. He cannot look away until he wakes up, and neither can we. REUPLOAD NEEDED
Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is an organism with its own laws of growth and change, so this book is a biography rather than a history. Ackroyd reveals the dozens of ways in which the continuity of the city survives - in ward boundaries unchanged since the Middle Ages, in vocabulary and in various traditions - showing London as constantly changing, yet forever the same in essence. Content: "Districts and Suburbs", "Fire and Pestilence", "Foundations", "Street Life and the People", "Trade and Enterprise".
In a magnificent feat of re-creating sixteenth-century London and Stratford, bestselling biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd brings William Shakespeare to life in the manner of a contemporary rather than a biographer. Following his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement with this definitive and imaginative biographical masterpiece.
Ackroyd is the most effortless guide. You wander by his side through the streets of the old city, savouring its bustle, colours and its smells, the stink of living. This is much more than history; it is a tapestry of inspiration and love. You will not find a better, more visionary book about a place we take for granted. An erudite labour of love, a fan-letter to a fabulous city, and a book one suspects Ackroyd was destined to write. It illuminates the English character, and is darkly humorous in its detail, tumbling through centuries crowded with legendary events and eccentric observations, as exuberant, energetic and alarming as the city itself.