The Plato Papers

Description

'A marvellous fable for our times... funny, wise and strange... A timeless literary masterpiece' - A.N. Wilson, Daily Mail On ritual occasions Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London to impart the ancient history of their city, dwelling particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300). He lectures on The Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and on Sigmund Freud; whilst providing a glossary of twentieth century terms, and explaining such early myths of creation as 'super-string theory' and 'relativity'. But then he has a dream, or vision, or he goes on a real journey - opinions are divided - and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. On his return, Plato shares his stories of this lost world, but his words spread consternation among his fellow citizens and they quickly put him on trial for corrupting the youth with his lies and fables.

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.

An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality and linguistic investigation... it reads like a spoof of New Age intellectualism... a lament for the millenium; a brave cry in the wilderness -- Michele Roberts * The Times * Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite... a carefully-pulsed breath of a book with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams * Independent * The Plato Papers is a serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind... It unleashes large, tolling resonances * Boston Globe * The Plato Papers can be enjoyed as a jeu d'esprit, but for students of Ackroyd it is something more... Richly revealing * New York Times *