ABSTRACT
Peter Ackroyd's writings—as novelist, poet, biographer, historian and critic—have been enormously diverse but two subjects have dominated his work in all fields. One is the city of his birth—London. The other is his sense of the connection—numinous and unashamedly mystical—between past and present, and his sense that our reality is but one of myriad realities which fiction can explore. Ackroyd was born in West London in 1949 and was brought up as a Catholic. Educated at Cambridge and Yale, he became a literary journalist and worked for the Spectator for a number of years. Ackroyd has written widely on Dickens's fiction and its use of London. The Victorian novelist's books are, in Ackroyd's telling words, 'deeply invaded by the city'. The same is true of his own novels. In 1986 he joined The Times as chief book reviewer. Ackroyd's earliest publications were volumes of poetry but he published his first novel in 1982 and has since written eight more.
