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Fire. Explosions. Meteorites. Chaos. Early life on Earth included all manner of freakish, alien creatures until the eventual arrival of the big-brained Homo sapiens. Peter Ackroyd explains the beginnings of the Earth in this book which is part of his epic ten-volume history of the world for children. Dare you voyage back through the mists of time... to the beginning?

A fictional account of the life of Thomas Chatterton. A young poet and elderly female novelist try to decode the clues found within an eighteenth-century manuscript, only to discover that their investigation is disclosing other secrets for which there is no solution.

A wonderful historical novel, set in London in the late 14th century. 'I am sister to the day and night. I am sister to the woods.' Sister Clarisse, a nun in the House of St Mary at Clerkenwell, experiences visions. She dreams of the English King. Are her prophesies the babblings of the crazed? Or can she 'see' a future in which Henry Bolingbroke overthrows Richard II? This clever and colourful novel begins with The Nun's Tale, and continues with The Friar's Tale, The Merchant's Tale and The Clerk's Tale.... Thus, story by story, Peter Ackroyd builds his portrait of medieval London. The people are disenchanted by the Church, with its wealth and corruption, its Pope in Rome and its Pope in Avignon. But heresy is dangerous... almost as dangerous as rebellion. This is a novel about spies and counter-spies, radicals and idealists, murderers and arsonists, sects and secret societies...

'I cannot wait to bring you to the plain of Troy. To show you the place where Hector and Achilles fought. To show you the palace of Priam. And the walls where the Trojan women watched their warriors in battle with the invader. It will stir your blood, Sophia.' Sophia Chrysanthis is only 16 when the German archaeologist Herr Obermann comes wooing: he wants a Greek bride who knows her Homer. Sophia passes his test, and soon she is tieing canvas sacking to her legs, so that she can kneel on the hard ground in the trench, removing the earth methodically, identifying salient points, lifting out amphorae and bronze vessels without damaging them. 'Archaeology is not a science,' Obermann says. 'It is an art.' Obermann is very good at the art of archaeology - perhaps too good at it. The amosphere at Troy is tense and mysterious. Sophia finds herself increasingly baffled by the past...not only the remote past that Obermann is so keen to share with her in the form of his beloved epics of the Trojan wars, but also his own, recent past - a past that he has chosen to hide from her. But she, too, is very good at the art of archaeology...

Hawksmoor is a novel of two threads, the historical segments interweaving with the present-day narratives to create a tale full of suspense. The story opens in eighteenth-century London, where Nicholas Dyer is an architect who has been commissioned to build seven new churches. He is approached by a sinister character, Mirabilis, who introduces him to black magic and tells him his fate is to build churches. Each church needs to be built with the blood of a boy on the foundation stones so Dyer organises the 'accidental' death of an 11-year-old boy on the scaffolding of Christ Church, Spitalfields. The novel cuts to twentieth-century London. Eleven-year-old Thomas Hill is a bookworm who likes playing in the grounds of Christ Church, Spitalfields. He has an accident by the steps and falls into a labyrinth built by Dyer 250 years before. He is injured and is found murdered the next day. Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates the murder of Tom, and a series of murders that follow on the sites of certain eighteenth-century London churches. The novel moves backwards and forwards between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, following Dyer and his twentieth-century double Hawksmoor. The finale sees the two slide into madness, inextricably linked at the end.

Management Teaching use: The juxtaposition of two different periods in the structure of this text would prompt a discussion on cause and effect. There is a linking with complexity in this as the detective in the 'modern' sections tries to work out the motivation for the murders. Eventually the rationale behind the parallel murders 'emerges' through a series of chance realisations. The emergence of the solution through chance as opposed to a step-by-step process can be compared to how complexity theory is applied to an organisation. It shows how a strictly logical approach to problem solving approach is an attractive proposition, but it is also simplistic. Students could consider how organisations find solutions to their problems and ask themselves whether it is through logical deduction, or as so often happens, through chance and inspiration.

At the centre of this intriguing, irresistible novel are the young Lambs: Charles, constrained by the tedium of his work as a clerk at the East India Company, taking refuge in a drink or three too many while spreading his wings as a young writer, and his clever, adoring sister Mary, confined by domesticity, an ailing, dotty father and a maddening mother... Into their lives comes William Ireland, an ambitious 17-year-old antiquarian and bookseller, anxious not only to impress his demanding showman of a father, but to make his mark on the literary world. When Ireland turns up a document in the handwriting of Shakespeare himself, he takes Mary into his confidence - but soon scholars and actors alike are beating a path to the little bookshop in Holborn Passage. Touching and tragic, ingenious, funny and vividly alive, this is Ackroyd at the top of his form in a masterly retelling of a 19th-century drama which keeps the reader guessing right to the end.

Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is an organism with its own laws of growth and change, so this book is a biography rather than a history. Ackroyd reveals the dozens of ways in which the continuity of the city survives - in ward boundaries unchanged since the Middle Ages, in vocabulary and in various traditions - showing London as constantly changing, yet forever the same in essence.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is said to have made his greatest contributions to original thought in science in 1665-6 while at his parents' home in Lincolnshire escaping the Great Plague (which had closed the universities), a period of which he wrote: 'I was in the prime of my age for invention'. It was at this fruitful time that he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity and did experiments which showed that white light was made up of different coloured rays. He returned to Trinity College Cambridge, where in 1699 he became Professor of Mathematics, but at first had to circulate his work privately among other scientists because no one would publish it. It was not until 1704 that his researches on calculus were published. He was the author of Principia, one of the most important books in the whole history of science, in which he proved the 'laws of motion'. In keeping with his age, Newton blurred the borders between science and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as about astronomy, dabbled in alchemy, and used the Bible to work out that the date of the earth's creation was 3500 BC.

Peter Ackroyd's method is to position Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. The book is packed with gems - and the reader turns the pages eagerly, keen to absorb the next nugget of information. Some snippets: Shakespeare was secretly a Roman Catholic; he wrote many more plays but these have been lost; the witches in Macbeth were not hags but women fairies or nymphs played by boys; and the strongest bond in the plays is between father and daughter perhaps reflecting Shakespeare's own family life.

In this sumptuous vision of Venice, Peter Ackroyd turns his unparalleled skill at evoking place from London and the River Thames, to Italy and the city of myth, mystery and beauty, set like a jewel in its glistening lagoon. His account is at once romantic and packed with facts, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the fiestas and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and a trading empire, the wars against Napoleon and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the mosaics of St Mark's and the glass blowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the doges and the destitute and the artists with their passion for colour and form - Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. There are wars and sieges, scandals and seductions, fountains playing in deserted squares and crowds thronging the markets. And there is a dark undertone too, of shadowy corners and dead ends, prisons and punishment. The language and way of thinking of the Venetians sets them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land.'The moon rules Venice,' Ackroyd writes: 'It is built on ocean shells and ocean ground; it has the aspect of infinity. It is the floating world... changing and variable and accidental.'