The Collection

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS WRIGHT

A fascinating anthology of journalism, lectures, short stories and miscellaneous writing by the author of London: The Biography.

During the 1970s and early 1980s Peter Ackroyd wrote countless book reviews and articles for the Spectator on
literature, film and a number of social issues. The Collection offers a selection of these incisive and witty pieces. In them, Ackroyd first explored the ideas that he would later develop in his novels and biographies. The articles from various publications in the 1980s and 1990s also throw interesting light on Ackroyd’s books and reveal his attitudes to literature and art. Included here are long pieces on Walter Pater and William Morris, as well as lectures on the Englishness of English literature, Blake and radicalism, and the nature of time. The Collection also contains articles on the work of contemporary painters and much previously unpublished material. The short stories in this volume date from every period of Ackroyd’s writing career; one of them is Ackroyd’s first published work of fiction.

Peter Ackroyd’s masterpiece London: The Biography was published in 2000 to critical acclaim and commercial
success. An award-winning biographer and a novelist, he has won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Thomas Wright edited Table Talk Oscar Wilde, the first English anthology of Oscar Wilde’s spoken stories. He was Peter Ackroyd’s researcher on a number of his recent projects.