Reading the biography of the most famous writer in the world should be a big experience, but at the end of this version I’m none the wiser. Historically and chronologically it all fits: the where, when, what was happening at the time etc. But as for the man, who was he? How did he live his life? How did he breathe, eat and drink? How did he communicate? How did behave to the people around him? Who was he? What made him Shakespeare? If we measure people by their actions as well as their work then he is only half measured here. If we make judgements on how people lived, then there is no life here. The book streamlined and nuanced in the fashion of author Peter Ackroyd almost pays lip service to the conspiracy theorists ‘there was no Shakespeare’ I say almost because the domestic bill paying, land buying, will leaving Shakespeare is evident. His accounts are accounted for but there is no account of how he lived his life and surely that's what should lie at the heart of a biography of the man and not his work. It’s an odd disappointment since Ackroyd is most famous for fictionalising the lives of others, people who lived and breathed and created great work, so why not here. It’s a small book that took me a long time to read, it might have benefited form being a bigger book in the style of his previous work, which for all their academic might are fun to read. It’s a book with little heart and soul about a man who surely must have been full of it, a man with the exaggerated power of imagination who understood the madness of life.