PETER ACKROYD is the biographer of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Thomas Moore, and the author of the bestselling "London: The Biography," The subject of his previous Brief Life was J.M.W. Turner. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award (jointly), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is the author of "Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination," and his novels include "The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde" (winner of the Somerset Maughn Award), "Hawksmoor" (Guardian Fiction Prize), "Chatterton" (short-lis