Charlie Chaplin

Haunting… Brilliant and unsparing – Simon Callow * Guardian *Compact, engrossing, intelligent – John Carey * Sunday Times *Chaplin’s rise makes an enthralling story, and it’s one perfectly suited to Peter Ackroyd’s prodigious and idiosyncratic talents… Ackroyd acknowledges Chaplin’s many human failings, while at the same time giving us a vivid sense of what made the man a genius – Lucy Hughes-Hallett * The Telegraph *A beautifully judged book, driven by a powerful sense of life’s sadness – Craig Brown * Mail on Sunday *[A] fine biography… The luxury of a short book about a vast life cannot be overestimated – Susie Boyt * Financial Times *Ackroyd has turned in the best account of Chaplin’s formation beneath the teetering chimney stacks of Victorian London, fragrant with the odours of dung, smoke and beer… Ackroyd is just the man to puncture the whoppers with which Chaplin embroidered his past, without being too much of a scold – Tom Shone * New Statesman *Ackroyd brings a novelist’s as well as a biographer’s eye to the story of a man who “seemed to epitomise the human condition itself, flawed and frail and funny” * Independent *Ackroyd digs deeply at the roots of a man who was a century ago the most famous person on the planet… bringing vividly to life the dark Victorian streets of south London – Gerard Henderson * Daily Express *This biography is like the wedge the Little Tramp liberates from beneath a docked ocean liner in Modern Times: it starts a thing of unstoppable momentum * Monocle *Perceptive and judicious – Rupert Christiansen * Literary Review *

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.

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