SOURCE: “Fact as Fiction,” in New Statesman, March 6, 1998, p. 47.

In the following review, Glover offers an unfavorable assessment of The Life of Thomas More.

It seems a long time since Peter Ackroyd published his last book, a novel about the surprising appearance of John Milton in the New World. Its single most memorable sentence would have made Sir Thomas More, the greatest of all defenders of the religion and values of pre-Reformation England, puke: “This missal,” Milton remarks with contempt during some routine persecution of a poor woman caught at her miserable devotions, “is fit only to make winding sheets for pilchards.”

Could it have been all of 18 months since those marvellously tangy words first appeared in print? At the time, the literary agent Giles Gordon likened Ackroyd’s working habits to all those planes that are banked above Heathrow waiting to descend, one every two minutes or...