SOURCE: “Fogey Heaven,” in New Statesman & Society, June 5, 1992, pp. 38-9.

In the following review of English Music, Taylor finds irritating shortcomings in Ackroyd's didacticism and antiquarianism, but declines to pass final judgment on the novel.

We read Peter Ackroyd’s fiction in rather the same way that the Victorian critic George Saintsbury read Anatole France: to find out what Peter Ackroyd has been reading. As one dense and allusive novel gives way to another, that task has become progressively more arduous.

The Great Fire of London and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, the early novels, were easy ones: a bit of Dickens, a very large amount of Wilde, a serious interest in all the spangled fakery that makes modern novels truly modern. By the time of Hawksmoor, the extent of Ackroyd’s fossicking in the British Museum reading-room could only be guessed at, but even this mixture...