Chaucer : Brief Lives

ISBN-13: 9780099287483 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 208 str.

Peter Ackroyd

Opis

Geoffrey Chaucer enjoyed an eventful life, serving with the Duke of Clarence and with Edward III. Through his wife, Philippa, he gained the patronage of John of Gaunt, which helped him carve out a career at Court. His official posts included Controller of Customs at the Port of London, Knight of the Shire for Kent, and King's Forester. He went on numerous adventurous diplomatic missions to France and Italy, and in 1359 was taken prisoner in France and ransomed.
He began to write in the 1360s, and his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, dominated the last part of his life. He died in 1400.
Peter Ackroyd's short biography, rich in drama and colour, evokes the medieval world of London and Kent, and provides an entertaining introduction to Chaucer's poetry.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Recenzje

Like a bird of biographical prey, Ackroyd identifies his subject in an iconic image of Chaucer addressing the court of Richard II and swoops to investigate Iain Finlayson The Times

O autorze

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.