In Dickens’s bicentenary year, it is pleasant to remind ourselves that the 19th century did, in fact, produce authors other than “The Inimitable”, as Dickens (only partly joking) called himself.

Peter Ackroyd might be one of the few working biographers worthy of his own biography. An uncommonly prolific and erudite writer from a working-class London background, Ackroyd seems to dwell more ...

In Peter Ackroyd’s “Brief Lives” series he has written about poet Geoffrey Chaucer, painter J.M.W. Turner and physicist Isaac Newton. This time around, Ackroyd turns his eye to American poet and ...

BETTER known for his biographies of Blake and Dickens, as well as the acclaimed London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd is also an award-winning novelist and this novel surely ranks among his best. So ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Plato Papers; T.S. Eliot; etc.) offers a huge, enthralling "biography" of the city of London. The reader segues through this litany of lists and anthology of ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Alfred Hitchcock was born in London in 1899 to devoutly Catholic parents, who reportedly instilled in him a fear of ...

Wilkie Collins, the most modern of Victorian novelists. Credit: Photo: Wilkie Collins...circa 1865: English novelist Wilkie Collins (1824 - 1889). (Photo by London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images) ...

Only the other day, in a box in the study, I turned up a sheaf of cuttings snipped out of The Spectator in the days when Peter Ackroyd wrote its weekly novel review. Incendiary stuff they were, too, ...