Picking at Peter's bits and pieces

What a grand title for Peter's odds and ends! One hundred and forty-one numbered pieces - book reviews, film reviews, essays, lectures and short stories - that demonstrate the versatility of Ackroyd's pen and the immutability of his views. "There is nothing more depressing," he declares in a review of a biography of Cyril Connolly, "than a reviewer who takes himself, or herself, too seriously." Ackroyd has had no need to do so because Thomas Wright, his devoted editor, has done it for him. The result is an artfully guided tour round an impressive literary landmark.

Milton, according to Ackroyd, had "a wonderful talent for abuse". The early pieces from the New Statesman show that Ackroyd, yet to have a novel published, made a name for himself by abusing other writers. In 1974, Napoleon Symphony, a novel by Anthony Burgess, left him "not particularly amused". A year later, in Love Or Nothing, the poet Douglas Dunn "uses a great many adjectives where none would do". Look at the Harlequins! is "the novel to end all of Nabokov's novels - or at least one hopes so". Miaow.

Ackroyd, as a twentysomething wannabe in the world of books, is a dyed-in-the-wool Leavisite. He hates French structuralism and never resists the opportunity to cock a snook at American postmodernism. His 1973 attack on Thomas Pynchon°s Gravity's Rainbow comes as a shock today, given that Ackroyd's own work reflects so many of its themes. "A private system of signs with their own internal coherence": the phrase is not from Gravity's Rainbow but from The Inheritance, one of the sinister tales included here, written by Ackroyd in 1979. The importance of the great tradition, the primacy of poetry over prose, an impatience with "prizes, committees, literary festivals and other nonsense" - Ackroyd assumes Leavis's mantle with ease. Impersonation is his strongest suit. Can you name a single character that Ackroyd has created rather than brought back to life? Hawksmoor, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Chatterton and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem feature real people: that is why Ackroyd makes no distinction between his novels and his biographies of TS Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More.

He needs to assume a ready-made personality to express himself. The giants of literature give him the space to explore his fascination with history and time. On Planet Ackroyd, people and places become one: London: The Biography, his masterpiece, is as much about its author as the capital. It is a superb synthesis of everything that has ever been written about London seen through the eyes of a pedestrian. The legwork is what counts. Ackroyd has no style of his own, which is why he has to borrow someone else's.

Edward Stanton, in The Plantation House, the final ghost story, "had the strangest sensation that he had become the house". The Collection allows the reader to see exactly how Ackroyd has built himself up into the much sought-after property he is today. The young fogey hurrying to review The Draughtsman's Contract in "a closed cab" knocked down the reputations of his elders and betters and set about reassembling the rubble. He sank his foundations in the glorious certainties of the English canon where Edmund Spenser and John Milton carry more weight than Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. However, he was just as prepared to review a television programme about Kenneth Williams as fillet the latest book on Shakespeare. His LWT lecture, London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries, in 1993 epitomises what became a very lucrative literary franchise.

Ackroyd is a consummate critic who shares his knowledge and prejudices with wit and clarity. He spells out his beliefs so clearly in his works that those who have read them do not need this "companion volume" to understand them. Even so, every fan should buy it. And yet these Sunday offerings - "a day of rest, I reserve it for journalism" - turn out to be oddly depressing.

"Prose may be a more difficult art, but poetry is the higher," said Ackroyd in 1987. It "offers the only language that can in the end reshape the world".

That was the year Ackroyd's one and only collection of verse, The Diversions of Purley, was published. Why he now feels the need to produce bloated books paraphrasing other people's works instead would be an interesting story. Perhaps he will tell it in his history of the English imagination due in 2002.