Shakespeare

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

This is a splendid and thoroughly absorbing book, one to read quickly at an enthusiastic gallop, and then to return to reading with care, relishing the observations and speculations which Ackroyd throws so copiously and prodigally before us...If you were to read only one book on Shakespeare, you would do well with this one

Allan Massie, Literary Review

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