ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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God’s other Englishman
SYLVIA HIKINS revisits the visionary world of Blake in a handsome book that sets him alongside his European contemporaries
NATIONALISM AND RACISM: (Left) Distress of the Fatherland (Not des Vaterlandes), Philipp Otto Runge, 1809; (Middle) Albion and the Fates, William Blake, 1804-1820; (Right) Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave, William Blake, 1793
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
William Blake’s Universe
David Birdman and Esther Chadwick
Philip Wilson, £35
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) is possibly best known as the creator of England’s unofficial national anthem. When I was a kid, my mother used to take me with her to the local Co-op Women’s Guild, and at the start of every meeting we would heartily sing “Jerusalem.”
England’s green and pleasant land was written in the context of a turbulent age of political upheaval where the American, French, and Haitian revolutions combined with the growth of modern capitalism. Unsurprisingly, both dissenting and visionary art flourished across Europe.
When you flick open the pages of this book, images and words created by European artists, including Blake, absolutely take your breath away. It’s obvious that William Blake was not simply the ultimate English eccentric that many of his contemporaries would want us to believe. Religious radicalism forms a central focus of his words and images.
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