Author Peter Ackroyd: ‘You eat a great deal of knowledge. You sick it up. And then you start again’

The last time I sat down with Peter Ackroyd to talk about the idea of England was over a very long dinner, involving, at his cheerfully belligerent insistence, four bottles of wine, bookended by several rounds of whisky and brandy. That evening, 25 years ago, ended with the biographer of Charles Dickens and William Blake lying flat out on the cobble stones outside a restaurant in London’s Charterhouse Square, disputing the material reality of the moon, while repeating a demand to “take me home Timmy and tuck me up”, an invitation I declined.

When I arrived to resume that conversation a quarter of a century on, last Tuesday, Ackroyd recalled our previous encounter with a bit of a wince. “I think we did this before in my drinking days,” he suggested, by way of hello. He runs through one or two recollections of that night as if from a former life, including his memory of trying to tell my fortune (“something once happened to you near a river…”). Ackroyd is now 74 and looks far trimmer and brightereyed than I remember. It is, he says, seven years since he gave up the drink (even a decade ago he was suggesting that he was down to two bottles of wine a night). “In the end I just got tired of it,” he says. “And also, it wasn’t good for my health. I mean, I was drinking far too much; it was like Niagara Falls.” He misses nothing about that previous life, he says, with half a smile and half a grimace. “Not least because it caused immense embarrassment and frequent physical pain.”

If those particular revels have ended, what has not ever for a moment abated in Ackroyd’s life is his other brimming compulsion: a devotion to the written word. Even since we last met he has added nine novels to his personal canon, and 34 works of nonfiction, including full-length biographies of Turner, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Chaplin and Hitchcock, a landmark sixvolume history of England and several additions to his ongoing inquiry into his native city including London: The Biography, London Under, and Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day.

I duck the question “and what have you been up to?”.

Ackroyd’s new book is about the evolution of Christianity in England, from the venerable Bede to Justin Welby. The book carries the title The English Soul, what he defines now as “a convenient shorthand for qualities which we don’t understand”.

As with all of Ackroyd’s books, you arrive at the end of this procession of mystics and evangelists, heretics and headbangers briefly cleverer than when you began. His history takes in lives of a multitude of believers from Julian of Norwich, through John Donne and John Wesley, to GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, with numerous enjoyable diversions along the way into the likes of Abiezer Coppe, who insisted on preaching the gospel naked, and the cult of the curse-making followers of Lodowicke Muggleton, which persisted from 1651 to 1979.

“With me,” Ackroyd says, “it’s always a voyage of discovery. I’m telling you what I didn’t previously know. And in my case, that’s a hell of a lot. And in the case of that book, the soul, it was