His abiding love is, of course, London – the city where he was born and has almost always lived, and which has infiltrated everything he has done. Much to the teeth-gnashing of academics, Ackroyd is no respecter of specialism, gliding serenely across such topics as Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Allan Poe, Turner’s watercolour technique, the origins of Englishness and the history of Venice. Ackroyd does nothing by half measures, as the legendary tales of his drinking testify. As far as I can calculate, there are now 18 works of fiction and more than 30 biographies and histories. Now in his late 60s, Ackroyd is famous for his Stakhanovite appetite for work: his books could fill a decent-sized bookcase, though such is their girth, you would probably need to reinforce it (his gargantuan 1990 biography of Dickens weighed in at 1,195 pages). It is a tight, faintly anonymous space crowded with books and prints, and with a discouraging view on to the back of a building. I n his flat in Knightsbridge, central London, Peter Ackroyd ushers me into his study.
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