Peter Ackroyd might appear to be the avuncular cross between Ronnie Barker and Arthur ‘Captain Mainwaring’ Lowe, but the sensible pullover and neat moustache belie his true nature: a prize-winning historian, journalist, novelist, broadcaster, biographer, former Spectator editor and Fellow of the Royal Academy, he has a CBE for services to literature, a (probably metaphorical) trophy cabinet groaning with literary awards and a host of bestselling fiction and non-fiction titles to his name, not least his definitive biography of London that John Simpson, writing in the Telegraph, praised as “superbly crafted, learned, intelligent ... the best monument the world’s capital could have”.

Ackroyd began his literary career as a poet before moving into fiction – some of his bestselling novels include Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Milton in America and The Plato Papers – but it was for his thoroughly researched yet accessible biographies of literary giants such as TS Eliot, Dickens, Ezra Pound, Shakespeare, Blake and Thomas More that he became perhaps more well-known. Maybe it’s because he’s a Londoner (Ackroyd was born and brought up in the capital, where he still lives), but in recent years he has been most prominent in the public eye for books, both fiction and non-fiction, that take London as their theme or backdrop: in addition to fiction works such as The Great Fire of London, The Clerkenwell Tales and The Lambs of London, he published the acclaimed London: The Biography in 2000, and its companion volume, Thames: Sacred River in 2007.

Appropriately, given this series, Peter Ackroyd’s latest book, simply entitled Venice, combines his scholarly love of detail with his poet’s eye to great effect. In it, he explores the history of the city, from the first arrivals – refugees fleeing the barbarian destroyers of the Roman Empire – to its peak as the centre of a vast trading empire, via its gurgling fountains, thronging markets and dark alleys. Join him in ‘La Serenissima ‘ as he evokes a city set apart from the rest of Italy, linked to the sea and the tides and as he poetically puts it; “ruled by the moon”.