Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Peter Ackroyd''s mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realised he was gay at the age of 7. Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict''s, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd''s Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot''s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd''s penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.