In a fictionalized autobiography, the controversial British writer considers the accomplishments and misfortunes of his life

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Literature & Fiction

ACKROYD, Peter

British & Irish

Harpercollins

Integrating portraits of an eighteenth-century architect and a modern London police inspector, this novel focuses on two men, both undergoing a process of disintegration and both involved in a series of similar murders

Hawksmoor

Genre Fiction

1990 first U.S. printing/edition. Superior copy. Excellent condition. From private collection.

Dickens

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

In a fictionalized autobiography, the controversial British writer considers the accomplishments and misfortunes of his life

Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

HarperCollins, Publishers

Detailed and definitive, this profile of the Victorian writer explores the private life of the complicated, insecure, and wildly ambitious man who became the best-known author of his day. By the author of Hawksmoor and T. S. Eliot. Reprint.

Dickens: Private Life and Public Passions

Arts & Literature

Perennial

Ackroyd’s short biography of perhaps the greatest and most original of all English painters, J.M.W. Turner. James Mallord William Turner was a Londoner through and through. His father had a barber’s shop in Covent Garden, his mother came from a line of London butchers. He was brought up in Maiden Lane. He was short and pugnacious and, as Peter Ackroyd writes: “His speech was recognizably that of a Cockney, and his language was the language of the streets. His language was also the language of light, as exemplified in his most innovative of paintings, which caused the critics of the day to come to blows . . . His dying words were: ‘The Sun is God.’” He entered the Royal Academy at 14 and a year later was exhibiting. His first loves were architecture, engraving and watercolours, and the country houses, cathedrals and landscape of England; he came to oils through his new passion for Italy. He was mean with money, never married, and spent a lot of his life living in taverns. When he died (within sight of his beloved Thames) he was living under the name of Booth in the Chelsea lodgings of one of his mistresses, a Mrs. Booth.

Turner: Brief Lives 2

Arts & Photography

Vintage Books

From the author of the bestselling London: The Biography, a poetic and powerful urban history of life and legend beneath London. This is a wonderful, atmospheric, historical, imaginative, oozing little study of verything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheatres to Victorian sewers and gang hide-outs. The depth below is hot, much warmer than the surface and this book tunnels down through the geological layers, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness, real and fictional -- rats and eels, monsters and ghosts. There is a bronze-age trackway under the Isle of Dogs, Wren found Anglo-Saxon graves under St Paul's, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. In Kensal Green cemetery there was a hydraulic device to lower bodies into the catacombs below -- "Welcome to the lower depths". A door in the plinth of statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge leads to a huge tunnel, packed with cables -- gas, water, telephone. When the Metropolitan Line was opened in 1864 the guards asked for permission to grow beards to protect themselves against the sulphurous fumes, and called their engines by the names of tyrants -- Czar, Kaiser, Mogul -- and even Pluto, god of the underworld. Going under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hidden world. "The vastness of the space, a second earth," writes Peter Ackroyd, "elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure." From the Hardcover edition.

London Under

History

Europe

The third brilliant short biography in Peter Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series. Newton is a companion volume to Chaucer and Turner. Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English genius, made his greatest contributions to original thought before the age of twenty-five while at home in Lincolnshire escaping the great plague of 1665, a period of which he wrote: “I was in the prime of age for invention.” Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an MP, Master of the Mind and President of the Royal Society, Newton, the author of Principia, one of the most important books in the history of science, was fascinated by calculus, the planets and the laws of motion, and, in keeping with his age, blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation. He was as passionate about astrology as astronomy, and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his scientific efforts.

Newton: BRIEF LIVES 3

Ackroyd at his best -- gripping short life of the extraordinary Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life' Wilkie Collins looked distinctily 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. 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 writer, his years of fame and his life-long friendship with the other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. A true Londoner, Collins, like Dickens, was fascinated by the secrets and crimes -- the fraud, blackmail and poisonings -- that lay hidden behind the city's respectable facade. He was a fighter, never afraid to point out injustices and shams, or to tackle the establishment head on. As well as his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone -- often called the first true detective novel -- and the sensational Women in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. But Collins had his own secrets: he never married, but lived for thirty years with the widowed Caroline Graves, and also had a second liaison, as 'Mr and Mrs Dawson', with a younger mistress, Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Both women remained devoted as illness and opium-taking took their toll: he died in 1889, in the middle of writing his last novel -- Blind Love. Told with Peter Ackroyd's inimitable verve this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great story-teller, full of surprises, rich in humour and sympathetic understanding.

Wilkie Collins

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Books by ACKROYD, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ACKROYD, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor

Dickens

Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor

Dickens: Private Life and Public Passions

Turner: Brief Lives 2

London Under

Newton: BRIEF LIVES 3

Wilkie Collins