SOURCE: “Shadow Play,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 25, 1992, p. 3, 11.

In the following review, Goodrich offers an unfavorable assessment of English Music.

Peter Ackroyd, the English novelist and biographer, has published nearly a dozen books, among them Dickens: Life and Times, Chatterton, T. S. Eliot, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Ezra Pound. It’s not hard to see from this selected list that one of Ackroyd’s major concerns is the writer at work, or to believe that Ackroyd really means it when he says, as he did to The New York Times last year, that he’s only “a half-person, a shadow” when he’s not writing books. The written word, for Ackroyd, is a force to be reckoned with, and he has spent much of his literary career doing just that: investigating and envisioning writers’ relationships with, and effect upon, the world.

Ackroyd...