Ackroyd won the double first in English at Clare College, Cambridge as an undergraduate & was a Mellon Fellow at Yale, in the United States. His career began around poetry, including works like London Lickpenny (1973) and A Diversions of Purley (1987). He late go into fiction & has be an acclaimed creator, including shortlisting for the Booker Prize in 1987.

Ackroyd has universally shown a great interest in the city of London & one of his virtually all recent works, London: A Life history, is an extensive & thorough discussion of London through the ages. Around 2002 he followed this by having a monumental ethnic history of England, Albion: A Origins of the English Imagination.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 & 1977 and became joint managing editor within 1978. He was nominated the Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984 & is presently the regular radio broadcaster and book critic.

Works
Fiction
A Wonderful Fire of London – 1982 A Go Testament of Oscar Wilde – 1983 Hawksmoor – 1985 Chatterton – 1987 (shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1987) Number 1 Weak – 1989 English Music – 1992 A Home of Doctor Dee – 1993 Dan Leno & a Limehouse Golem – 1994 (also published when A Test of Elizabeth Cree) Milton within United states of america – 1996 A Plato Papers – 1999 A Clerkenwell Tales – 2003 A Lambs of London – 2004

Non-fiction
Notes for the Recently Culture: An Essay in Modernism – 1976 Dressing Higher: Cross dressing & Drag: A History of an Obsession – 1979 T. S. Eliot; The Life – 1984 ''Dickens' London: An Inventive Vision – 1987 Ezra Pound & his Globe – 1989 Dickens – 1990 An Introduction to Dickens – 1991 Blake – 1996 London: A Life history – 2000 Albion: A Origins of the English Imagination – 2002 Shakespeare: A Life'' – 2005