The English Ghost by Peter Ackroyd
The English, Peter Ackroyd tells us in this fascinating collection, see more ghosts than any other nation. Each region has its own particular spirits, from the Celtic ghosts of Cornwall to the dobies and boggarts of the north. Some speak and some are silent, some smell of old leather, others of fragrant thyme. From medieval times to today, stories have been told and apparitions seen - ghosts who avenge injustice, souls who long for peace, spooks who just want to have fun. The English Ghost is a treasury of such sightings - which we can believe or not, as we will. The accounts, packed with eerie detail, range from the door-slamming, shrieking ghost of Hinton Manor in the 1760s and the moaning child that terrified Wordsworth's nephew at Cambridge, to the headless bear of Kidderminster, the violent daemon of Devon who tried to strangle a man with his cravat and the modern-day hitchhikers on Blue Bell Hill. Comical and scary, like all good ghost stories, these curious incidents also plumb the depths of the English psyche in its yearnings for justice, freedom and love.
Ackroyd's tales of ghosts are all the more touching for the common humanity of the awestricken witnesses - labourers and vicars, nurses and seamstresses - striving to describe the indescribableFunny, bizarre and frightening by turns, this is a rich and compelling assembly of stories for winter nights. -- Rebecca Stott * New Statesman *
Ackroyd remains a spectral presence throughout, appearing now and then to introduce a story -- Edward King * Sunday Times *
To spend time with this compact, handsome volume in the darkening nights of autumn is to lay oneself open to feelings of persistent disquiet...It represents Ackroyd's latest exploration of interests that have dominated his professional life: the weird, promiscuous mingling of present, past and future which he perceives to be threaded through human existence. -- Jonathan Barnes * TLS *
Ackroyd remains a spectral presence throughout, appearing now and then to introduce a story -- Edward King * Sunday Times *
To spend time with this compact, handsome volume in the darkening nights of autumn is to lay oneself open to feelings of persistent disquiet...It represents Ackroyd's latest exploration of interests that have dominated his professional life: the weird, promiscuous mingling of present, past and future which he perceives to be threaded through human existence. -- Jonathan Barnes * TLS *
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780701169893 |
| ISBN 10 | 0701169893 |
| Title | The English Ghost |
| Author | Peter Ackroyd |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2010-10-07 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |