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Reading lists

How books are revealing a new queer history of the UK

Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Queer City

Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population.

After his mammoth, shamanic aria London: the Biography, the remarkable writer Peter Ackroyd has produced a nimble, uproarious pocket history of sex in his beloved metropolis

Ackroyd has an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, and a poet's instinct for its strange, mesmerising drives and urges ... Queer City contains something to alarm or fascinate on every page

Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts

If there was a prize for the most evocative or salacious chapter headings, then Peter Ackroyd's new book, Queer City, would be the undisputed victor. They capture the rudery and naughtiness, although not the erudition of this entertaining history of the 'queer' experience in London

The kind of screed a queer person would be remiss if they did not pick up. This is a call to arms... Throughout the book it is made clear that for every halcyon day, there was a dystopia that preceded and followed. The one great progress Ackroyd highlights is that we have one thing in the 21st century that the other eras did not: an attempt a 'gay community' ... London relies on queerness as much as queers have relied on the labyrinth and the bacchanal of the Big Smoke. Now, it seems, we have a chance to change it in the open

Ackroyd's brisk little history of what he calls queer London is itself a collation of sweetmeats

Always entertaining ... much to be recommended

This gallop through the pink past [...] tells a torrid tale of persecution and pleasure, of blackmail and blue murder

By shining a light in dark places, Ackroyd has created a triumphantly queer picture of a city he loves – as city as queer as any other

A timely reminder that gay lives have always been tightly woven into London's rich social brocade

If you've never read anything by Peter Ackroyd, imagine settling down in a pub… There you are, ensconced in that pub… and you're stuck by the realization that your companion is so knowledgeable, so erudite, so simply brilliant that you don't care you've not got a word in edgeways since the first few foamy quaffs a couple of hours back. That's what reading Peter Ackroyd is like… Ackroyd possesses a lightness of touch which means the reader never feels overwhelmed by the accumulation of facts, figures, and salacious anecdotes they're presented with… Endlessly fascinating... This book teaches us the importance that queer life in London has, and always will have, to all of us

This is a very worthy book that charts queer experience onto the map of London from which it has been omitted for so many centuries

A rambunctious chronicle of “gay London from pre-Roman times to the present day”

Ackroyd delivers an excellent queer read about London, this time ‘our’ London…  Endless facts delight and amuse in this celebration and investigation of queer life from Celtic times to the present day… Validating, interesting and endlessly fascinating

Teeming with incredible stories, amazing characters and extraordinary detail, Queer City is the fascinating story of LGBT+ London from the Romans to the present day and reveals the incredibly rich history of London’s LGBT+ past

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.

‘Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts’ Simon Callow, Guardian 
 
In this powerful Sunday Times bestseller Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population. 
 
In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. 
 
Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS. 
 
Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

Alfred Hitchcock

Peter Ackroyd turns his gimlet eye to one of the twentieth century's most revered directors.

Superb, insightful short life... Deft and moving

[A] nutritious, compact and superb critical biography

Shelves of serious biographies have been written on Alfred Hitchcock, but perhaps none as pleasurable as Peter Ackroyd’s

This is an elegantly spare and hugely readable book – which sends you straight back to the films

An accessible and efficient primer to [Hitchcock’s] life and work

Ackroyd…lucidly evokes the textures of Hitchcock’s eccentric life and blends these with a confident examination of the major films in Hitchcock’s remarkable output

An engaging introduction and intriguing invitation to revisit the films

Provides a fascinating insight into how this strange man was able to create so many enduring silver screen classics

An extremely readable and concise biography of Britain’s most famous film director

Shelves of serious biographies have been written on Alfred Hitchcock, but perhaps non as pleasurable as Peter Ackroyd’s with its flowing prose and insightful appreciation.

A well-written and eminently readable book.

Alfred Hitchcock was a strange child. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition, his childhood was an isolated one, scented with fish from his father's shop. Afraid to leave his bedroom, he would plan great voyages, using railway timetables to plot an exact imaginary route across Europe. So how did this fearful figure become the one of the most respected film directors of the twentieth century? 
 
As an adult, Hitch rigorously controlled the press's portrait of himself, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring all others out. In this quick-witted portrait, Ackroyd reveals something more: a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashes a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. Iconic film stars make cameo appearances, just as Hitch did in his own films. Grace Kelly, Carey Grant and James Stewart despair of his detached directing style, and, perhaps most famously of all, Tippi Hedren endures cuts and bruises from a real-life fearsome flock of birds. 
 
Alfred Hitchcock wrests the director's chair back from the master of control and discovers what lurks just out of sight, in the corner of the shot.

Charlie Chaplin

A fresh look at Chaplin from the masterful Peter Ackroyd

Chaplin's rise makes an enthralling story, and it's one perfectly suited to Peter Ackroyd's prodigious and idiosyncratic talents... Ackroyd acknowledges Chaplin's many human failings, while at the same time giving us a vivid sense of what made the man a genius

A beautifully judged book, driven by a powerful sense of life’s sadness

[A] fine biography… The luxury of a short book about a vast life cannot be overestimated

Ackroyd has turned in the best account of Chaplin's formation beneath the teetering chimney stacks of Victorian London, fragrant with the odours of dung, smoke and beer... Ackroyd is just the man to puncture the whoppers with which Chaplin embroidered his past, without being too much of a scold

Ackroyd brings a novelist's as well as a biographer's eye to the story of a man who "seemed to epitomise the human condition itself, flawed and frail and funny"

Ackroyd digs deeply at the roots of a man who was a century ago the most famous person on the planet... bringing vividly to life the dark Victorian streets of south London

This biography is like the wedge the Little Tramp liberates from beneath a docked ocean liner in Modern Times: it starts a thing of unstoppable momentum

Writing at an energetic lick, Peter Ackroyd examines this glittering but tragic life with the cool detachment of a psychiatrist or judge. In his powers of insight, and agility in making his connections, he's second to none

Illuminating and timely... Ackroyd has written a model biography, as crisp and succinct as a Chaplin two-reeler

[Ackroyd] brings his usual colour to a black and white world

Ackroyd deserves uncompromising praise... Unputdownable

An engaging biography that will enrich your subsequent viewings of Charlie Chaplin's films… Will satisfy fans old and new

A beautifully written synthesis of the most important elements of Chaplin’s long career and his significance as an international figure… Hopefully this book will bring Charlie Chaplin the wider love and acclaim that he richly deserves

Ackroyd's analysis of the Tramp... is brilliant and unsparing... Wonderful stuff

Compelling account of how Chaplin rose from poverty to be one of the most influential figures of the 20th century

Ackroyd brings a sense of Chaplin as a man

Ackroyd paints a moving portrait of Chaplin’s final years… But it’s those early scenes of poverty and squalor in Victorian London that linger in the reader’s mind, as they did in Chaplin’s own

He was the very first icon of the silver screen, and is one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood, even a hundred years on from his first film. But what of the man behind the moustache? The director holding the camera as well as acting in front of it? 
 
Peter Ackroyd's new biography turns the spotlight on Chaplin's life as well as his work, from his humble theatrical beginnings in music halls to winning an honorary Academy Award. Everything is here, from the glamour of his golden age to the murky scandals of the 1940s and eventual exile to Switzerland. This masterful brief life offers fresh revelations about one of the most familiar faces of the last century and brings the Little Tramp into vivid colour.

Hawksmoor

'There is no Light without Darknesse 
and no Substance without Shaddowe' 
 
So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . 
 
'Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed' Independent on Sunday 
 
Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London.

Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed

Extraordinary, amazing, vivid, convincing.  [Ackroyd's] view of life questions the role not just of the novel but of art and history, memory, time and much else

A novel remarkable for [its] power, ingenuity and subtlety

Novelist, biographer and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. From a working-class family in west London, he got a scholarship to Cambridge and went on to Yale. He was literary editor of the Spectator and then chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times for many years. He has written over a dozen novels as well as acclaimed biographies of Eliot and Dickens, and a history of London.

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor was first published in 1985. Alternating between the eighteenth century, when Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Christopher Wren, builds seven London churches that house a terrible secret, and the 1980s, when London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sight of certain old churches, Hawksmoor is a brilliant tale of darkness and shadow.

Three Brothers

Rapier-sharp, witty, intriguing and mysterious: a new novel from Peter Ackroyd, set in 1960s London

A camp clever tour de force… an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Brilliant… the quintessence of Ackroyd

A book full of rich and sudden moments of delight

Harking back to Dickens... London is a major character in the novel. In Ackroyd's accomplished hands the city becomes a mystical place, where visions abound. Highly recommended.

Ackroyd is that timeless figure, a man of letters, dipped in ink, apparently versatile in a breathtaking variety of genres

London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, from bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs

Suffused with Ackroyd’s intelligence and learning

Ackroyd’s pen portraits of the intersecting worlds of academia, literary London and Fleet Street are written with relish

An amalgam of social satire and noirish thriller...vintage Ackroyd

Superb... [Ackroyd] makes the familiar deliciously mysterious

In a slender novel, London's great fictional mapper Peter Ackroyd has woven together a rich spread of tales of the city

Ackroyd writes about the capital, from Camden to Chelsea, like no-one else and he captures the sense of the sixties perfectly, with high-society and low-life London so dangerously close to each other. Full of twists and turns, this is Ackroyd's most exciting novel to date

A classic Ackroyd tale that will not fail to please

Three Brothers follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, born on a post-war council estate in Camden Town. Marked out from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world – a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, back-biters and petty thieves. 
 
London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, reinforcing Ackroyd’s grand theme that place and history create, surround and engulf us. From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs. Everything is possible – not only in the new freedom of the 1960s but also in London’s timeless past.

Wilkie Collins

Ackroyd at his best - a gripping short life of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White.

With deft strokes, Peter Ackroyd’s biography portrays his character and sets him in context, weaving critical appraisals seamlessly into the story of his life. The bravura of this biography lies in its brilliantly judged brevity.

Concise but wide-ranging… A fitting tribute to [Collins’] legacy

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women – and avidly read by generations of readers. 
 
Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, ‘the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists’, from his childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone – often called the first true detective novel – and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser-known works. 
 
Told with Ackroyd’s inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.

Peter Ackroyd

Philip Jackson

Norman Rodway

Adjoa Andoh

Jamie Foreman

Peter Marinker

Philip Glenister

Nigel Anthony

Tracy-Ann Oberman

Simon Callow

Miranda Foster

Anthony Ofoegbu

Full Cast

Four BBC Radio 4 Dramas

Stunning all-star adaptations of Ackroyd's intriguing London stories 
 
A superb collection of dramas guaranteed to thrill and entertain from best-selling author Peter Ackroyd. Set in the heart of London, these star-studded adaptations feature parallel investigations into killings across two centuries, black magic, haunted houses, holy ghosts and a stunning performance by Simon Callow as the magnificent Charles Dickens. 
 
Novelist, biographer and critic, Peter Ackroyd, has cemented his place at the heart of the culture and history of London. This fantastic collection is full of vitality from a world-class author and stellar cast. 
 
Hawksmoor - London, 1711: Nicholas Dyer, an 18th-century architect, builds churches to the glory of God, but he is hiding a dreadful purpose. Nicholas Hawksmoor, a detective in contemporary London, is called to investigate a series of brutal murders. The key lies deep in the past, but will the detective be able to solve the case before another life is lost...? Philip Jackson, best known for his role as Chief Inspector Japp in the TV and radio productions of Poirot, stars in the title role. 
 
The House of Doctor Dee - Matthew Palmer is left an old house in London's Clerkenwell. Once owned by an Elizabethan scholar who was reputedly involved in black magic, the house hides dark secrets. Featuring Philip Glenister, best known for his role in Life on Mars and Eastenders' Tracy-Ann Oberman. 
 
The City Speaks - A unique series of dramas based on Ackroyd's short story in which the Virgin Mary makes an appearance in the City of London. The stories range from humorous to highly emotional, from heart-warming to bizarre: Canary Wharf resembles the Emerald City, voodoo goddesses wander the streets of East London casting evil before them, and a tube station exists beneath the capital, but doesn't appear on any map... Featuring Peter Marinker, Adjoa Andoh and Jamie Foreman. 
The City Speaks was a co-production between BBC Radio Drama and Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN). 
 
The Mystery of Charles Dickens - Simon Callow delivers an outstanding performance of Peter Ackroyd's one-man show portraying both Charles Dickens and many of his best-loved characters. Readings from his novels interweave with Dickens' own words in an incisive, compassionate and unforgettable journey. This collection features an exclusive introduction by Simon Callow. 
 
©2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Peter Ackroyd

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