Shakespeare: The Biography

(Paperback)

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Description

A 'living attempt to reach into the world and heart of Shakespeare'. Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, a book by a writer about a writer, this marvellous biography is a tour de force Peter Ackroyd's marvellous biography is a living attempt to reach into the heart of Shakespeare.He creates an intimate and immediate connection with his subject, so that the book reads like the work of a contemporary - meeting Shakespeare afresh on his own ground.Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, this is a book by a writer about a writer, and a fascinating and detailed depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited.

Reviews

This is a commendably thorough, engagingly self-effacing new look at a writer whom literary history has never quite managed to pin down, nor ever will. It is the book Peter Ackroyd was born to write -- Anthony Holden * Daily Mail *
Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game... his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing... His biography ranks with the best of them * Financial Times *
His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist -- Nicholas Shakespeare * Saturday Telegraph *
A big, expansive, densely imagined book -- Sam Leith * Spectator *
You will not find a better book on Shakespeare... Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare's life - Colin MacCabe, Independent

Author Bio

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.