Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London and one of his most recent works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 2002 he followed this with the monumental and eclectic cultural history of England, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. He was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984 and is currently a regular radio broadcaster and book critic.

WORKS:

Fiction:

The Great Fire of London – 1982
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde – 1983
Hawksmoor – 1985
Chatterton – 1987
First Light – 1989
English Music – 1992
The House of Doctor Dee – 1993
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem – 1994
Milton in America – 1996
The Plato Papers – 1999
The Clerkenwell Tales – 2003
The Lambs of London – 2004

Non-fiction:

Notes for a New Culture - 1976
Dressing Up: Transvestism & Drag – 1979
T. S. Eliot: A Life – 1984
Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision – 1987
Ezra Pound and his World – 1989
Dickens – 1990
An Introduction to Dickens – 1991
Blake – 1996
London: The Biography – 2000
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination – 2002
Shakespeare: The Biography – 2005