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’.

Interview with Andy Wilson on Jason Whittaker’s Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness

Jason Whittaker has written a fascinating history of Blake’s poem and the hymn we know as Jerusalem, set to music by Hubert Parry and sung every year at the Last Night of the Proms.. Elsewhere on The Traveller in the Evening, Andy Wilson wrote a long review of the book, entitled No Place Called Home: Jason Whittaker on William Blake’s Jerusalem and ‘Progressive’ Nationalism. Here, Conor Kostick interviews Andy, partly about the review and, by extension, about his own views on Blake, nationalism, politics and the counterculture.