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“... Strong) to put enough of a dent in multinational budgets to command serious media attention was Peter Ackroyd, a meticulously re-invented Man of Letters. The others, until Ben Watson elbowed his way onto the scene, have had to settle for a succès d’estime, quasi-academic projects with spin (such as the provocative series edited by Denise Riley for ...”

“... sentimental climax. Dickens’s novel, and his fiction generally, echo disconcertingly through Ackroyd’s. The main character, Spenser Spender (a poet manqué, what else?), struggles to get a film version of Little Dorrit off the ground. His Circumlocution Office is found in the Film Finance Board. Various Dickensian look-alikes cross Spender’s ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s ...”

“... fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that ...”

“... off the number 46 bus expecting to be greeted on the front steps of the Sunday Times building by Peter Roberts, the Managing Editor, dispensing dismissal notices like handbills. Everything seems quite normal, however, though the building is thinly populated. I meet one friend who tells me that he has lived through the worst night of his life but has opted ...”

“... the rejection of Modernism, ‘the impoverishment of national culture’, as the admired Peter Ackroyd calls it, dominate the final section. But the period has its heroes, and Appleyard’s choices of hero seem to coincide with those of Ackroyd: they are J.H. Prynne, ‘the most comprehensively gifted of ...”

“... celebrated painting ‘Solstice of the Sunflower’ currently prominent on the jacket of the new Peter Ackroyd novel itself perhaps not unconnectedly both published at this very time and much preoccupied with the notion of co-terminous strata of existence from the Neolithic period to our own features a perfect catherine-wheel-configured crop circle ...”

“... watch it, will find himself taken up by the Modern Painters crowd, the disciples of the late Peter Fuller. As a high-profile poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does ...”

“... all the poetry. None of these books has the scope or importance of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Peter Ackroyd’s Ezra Pound and His World brings together 111 photographs, drawings and other illustrations and offers a linking text summarising the poet’s life and literary career. The biography – inevitably, I suppose – draws heavily on the work of ...”

“... manufactured a French infiltrator called Spy Nozy. How, then, should a Life of Blake be written? Peter Ackroyd is having a go at one, and I suspect that what attracts him is Blake’s London, for which King has very little feeling. The poetry is crowded with London voices and London places. I remember my delight as a student when a supervisor remarked ...”

“... think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this level. My second reading was helped ...”

“... and concluding that it could go either way. Formally, too, he errs on the side of prudence. Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Holroyd doesn’t insert fictional passages; nor does he emulate Edmund Morris’s insertion of himself – as a schoolboy – into a life of Ronald Reagan. But he’s there nonetheless. It’s been possible to detect Holroyd’s presence in ...”

“... from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered Peter Arne (in a blizzard of newsprint dots), Charles Hawtrey having a very bad hair day after a house fire in Deal. Seabrook loves the reforgotten, the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature ...”

“... House, with characters who struggled to agree about how to live in the world and what to believe. Peter Ackroyd provides a nice picture of the novelist in the agonies of trying to complete his new house, sitting disconsolately on a stepladder while ‘Irish labourers stare in through the very slates.’ A later visitor, Hans Christian Andersen, saw a ...”