Peter Ackroyd (Introducer) 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. Margaret Reynolds (Introducer) Margaret Reynolds is a writer, academic, critic and broadcaster- her previous books include The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories , The Sappho Companion and Victorian Women Poets- An Anthology and a series of study guides on contemporary writers, Vintage Living Texts .