Category: Review
Mike Westbrook, Phil Minton & The Lo-Fi Improvised Music Ensemble with Sue Lynch: Intimations of a Future for Blake’s Music
In November 2022, The Mike Westbrook Band and The Lo-Fi Improvised Music Ensemble performed settings of Blake’s texts that raise questions about how Blake has previously been made to sing.
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Video Interview with Andy Wilson re. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness
The patriotic frenzy around Brexit and the death of Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor offers an opportunity to reappraise Blake’s song Jerusalem and the nationalistic impulse so many find in it. Here Conor Kostick interviews Andy Wilson about his recent review of Jason Whittaker’s new book on Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.
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Brian Catling: Avoiding Blake: Defeated by a Flea in the Ear, a Talk to the Blake Society
Brian Catling gave a talk to the Blake Society about his relationship to Blake, running a meter over his work to detect splinters of Blakean influence, from his early confusion of Blake and Bunyan, to his use of Blake as a character in his novel, The Erstwhile.
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Iain Sinclair: Blake’s Mental Traveller and The Gold Machine, a Talk to the Blake Society
In Sept 2021, Iain Sinclair gave an improvised talk to the Blake Society about how Blake’s poem, The Mental Traveller, became the map and model for a lifetime of journeys and pilgrimage quests. The Mental Traveller was an awakening, to be experienced but not yet understood. The poem returned at various points in the years that followed, until it was acknowledged as the secret code for Sinclair’s most recent book, The Gold Machine, a late-life expedition to one of the sources of the Amazon, in the footsteps of his great-grandfather.
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Video Interview with Andy Wilson re. William Blake vs the World
John Higgs recently published his book, William Blake vs the World—a ‘countercultural’ take on Blake’s work, written for a non-academic audience. Here, Conor Kostick interviews Andy Wilson about his review of the book and more generally about Blake’s relevance to the countrculture.
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Blake in Beulah: A Review of John Higgs’s ‘William Blake vs The World’
John Higgs’s new book promises a contemporary take on the works of William Blake, making them relevant to a modern audience generally, and to the counterculture in particular. So, how well does it live up to its promise?
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Conor Kostick: Art and Revolution – A Review of John Molyneux’s Dialectics of Art
The topic of art and revolution deserves a much better book than John Molyneux’s The Dialectics of Art. This critical review explains why.
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Peter Linebaugh’s Red Round Globe, Hot, Burning
The Irish Independent Left conducted an interview with the historian Peter Linebaugh about his book, Red Round, Globe Hot, Burning, which discusses Blake at several points and makes some excellent observations about him, Thomas Spence, and others, and their relevance to our times.
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