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“... Dryasdust has had his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the ...”

“... inhuman meaning in it, a cabalistic topographical pattern of the sort familiar from the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Iain Sinclair. She may be a husbandless housewife living in a rundown seaside resort, but she is no ordinary housewife from a seaside town. When Miller mentions his computer password, she immediately announces what hers would be if she had ...”

“... she was mistaken, but not that the biographer of Dickens with ‘no sense of humour whatever’ is Peter Ackroyd or that the German epigraph is by Wilhelm Müller or that Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard. Patric Dickinson, Felicity Ashbee and David Cecil are among the dozens of names who pass by unnoted and still more are missing from the index. How ...”

“... wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of restraint, family values and ‘much-mended leather ...”

“... research Claire Tomalin draws – concludes that Dickens visited Nelly for elocution lessons. Peter Ackroyd has put an only slightly less pure interpretation on the connection: Dickens and Nelly enjoyed (or suffered) a ‘sexless’ marriage, in which she played out the part of the idealised virgin bride. An opposite line which traces itself back to ...”

“... kindly paterfamilias with twinkling eyes – disintegrated; his friends were appalled. Slater and Peter Ackroyd, looking at the same letters and bills of fare, the same reminiscences of children and admirers, aren’t convinced Dickens ever slept with Nelly Ternan, but Tomalin’s Dickens is so virile (those ten children): of course he did. We know ...”

“... and strangely interminable,’ having discovered that it was by no means a matter of one night, as Peter Ackroyd conjectured in his life of Eliot. It was also, to say the least, opportunistic; he professed to be having it in order to help the Eliots in a time of trouble, and as it ended he told Colette O’Neil, as it were with a complacent sigh, how much ...”

“... uncannily like one of those advent-calendar mobiles they used to make out of coat-hangers on Blue Peter. That’s how it goes with structures of occult significance. Phenomena which seem loaded with brooding horror by evening have a funny way of looking limp, harmless and rather foolish by the rising light of day. In one section of the novel – Book II to be ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... if there was more supernatural activity in the late 1930s than at any other time? Poltergeists, as Peter Ackroyd tells us in The English Ghost, can be dated back to at least the 12th century, though they went by other names. The term poltergeist, from the German for a ‘noisy or merry ghost’, was certainly popularised in Britain in the 1920s and ...”

“... Dr Abse’s analogy is false. There are clear differences of degree in anti-semitism. Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot (LRB, Vol. 6, No 20), Professor Ricks began: ‘Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I ...”

“... and small print and, though provided with new introductions in 1994 and supplementary essays by Peter Ackroyd and Germaine Greer thereafter, is still based on a text prepared by Peter Alexander in 1951. It is surely not a coincidence that the RSC is the same price as the hardbacks of the revised Oxford and the ...”

“... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...”

“... death ten years later effectively keep intruders like Edgar Johnson, Kaplan and the still-to-come Peter Ackroyd for ever out of the intimate recesses of his life. But in one respect Dickens, like Trollope, very invitingly opened a door for his future biographers by recording – in all its inwardness and sordid detail – his suffering at the blacking ...”

“... Patroclus. Yes, my darling. Not only God was out that day but Lord Apollo. It’s as though Peter Ackroyd were chronicling the capers of an order of warrior monks. Achilles bitches on about ‘Cuntstruck Agamemnon’, while the narrator refers to himself and his fellow soldiers as ‘we normals’. Gods and Trojans are similarly campy. Zeus refers ...”