Vivid and readable biography of the ultimate playwright

Shakespeare: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, €32.

When a man and his life have been so written to death as William Shakespeare, it is a brave and presumptuous step to subtitle any book about him as being ‘the' biography.

Yet if anyone has earned his spurs sufficiently in the business of biographical studies of English writers, surely it is Peter Ackroyd.

Ackroyd has previously produced masterful studies of TS Eliot, ...