Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River as well as biographies of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Wilkie Collins, Thomas More and, most recently, Charlie Chaplin. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.
Superb, insightful short life... Deft and moving -- Bee Wilson * The Guardian * Irresistible -- Louise Jury * The Independent * An elegant and hugely enjoyable read -- Alexander Larman * Sunday Express * [A] nutritious, compact and superb critical biography -- Roger Lewis * Daily Mail * Shelves of serious biographies have been written on Alfred Hitchcock, but perhaps none as pleasurable as Peter Ackroyd’s -- Kate Muir * The Times *