Alexander Stuart

I was sad to finish Peter Ackroyd's brief biography of Charlie Chaplin , for a whole variety of reasons, some quite personal, others simply that the book left me even more intrigued about one of the world's - and certainly cinema's - most famous men than when I started reading it.  I could not, in the end, decide whether Ackroyd actually liked Chaplin or not, and neither perhaps could he.  Chaplin's origins in south London were so harsh that it is hard not to feel sympathy, indeed empathy, for him and to forgive, to a large (though decreasing, as his life progressed) degree the way he responded to the world.  He was entirely his own man - Ackroyd says at one point that he never liked to wear a watch or know what time it was (neither do I), nor even what day of the week it was (I suspect that might be a slight exaggeration, but I share that wish, too). He created, over a period of years, the best know