Albion : The Origins of the English Imagination

EDITORIAL REVIEW: 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. A dazzling, highly original exploration of English culture from its roots in the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, ALBION demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality imbues every form of cultural expression - not just literature, but also painting, music, architecture, philosophy, and science When William Wordsworth invoked "the ghostly language of the ancient earth" he spoke more, perhaps, than he knew.