"Biographers are simply novelists without imagination": in one of the fanciful interchapters of his biography Dickens (1990), Peter Ackroyd imagines hearing this sentiment from Charles Dickens. The statement illuminates the challenge biography holds for Ackroyd, who considers novel writing his profession. While working on Dickens, Ackroyd told an interviewer for Publishers Weekly (25 December 1987), "I hate being called a biographer": the term was "not only an insult but also untrue" in terms of his "time spent or vocation." But in 1992 he told an audience at a public "conversation" that he found the combination of novel writing and biography "fruitful." By that time he had also changed his mind about making Dickens his last biography and was researching the life of William Blake.

As his career has developed, Ackroyd has sought "a new way to interanimate" biography and fiction. All of his novels have historical elements, and four have biographical titles...