Shakespeare

This is a commendably thorough, engagingly self-effacing new look at a writer whom literary history has never quite managed to pin down, nor ever will. It is the book Peter Ackroyd was born to write – Anthony Holden * Daily Mail *Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game… his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing… His biography ranks with the best of them * Financial Times *His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist – Nicholas Shakespeare * Saturday Telegraph *A big, expansive, densely imagined book – Sam Leith * Spectator *You will not find a better book on Shakespeare… Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare’s life - Colin MacCabe, IndependentThis is a splendid and thoroughly absorbing book, one to read quickly at an enthusiastic gallop, and then to return to reading with care, relishing the observations and speculations which Ackroyd throws so copiously and prodigally before us…If you were to read only one book on Shakespeare, you would do well with this one – Allan Massie * Literary Review *

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, Thames - Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. 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.

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