Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with an inspired look into the heart and the history of the English imagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artists as diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten and Viriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimes contradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, a passion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. A brilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albion reveals the manifold nature of English genius.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 11/09/2004
ISBN: 9780385497732
Pages: 576
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.26w x 1.17d

Review Citations: New York Times 11/21/2004 pg. 36