William Blake puts his arms around us, one of the greatest artists our islands ever produced. He invented a way to put words and images on a page to express his poetry and art in a manner only replicated 200 years later by the internet. He created colour prints that develop before your eyes like Polaroids, then become scenes under the deep ocean or in the starry heavens above. Even at the time his followers didn’t know what to say.

In this alluring and poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the enduring legacy of William Blake and how he came to inspire so many creative lives. Reaching out of his past and into our future Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. This stirring, deeply felt book brings us back to Blake and shows that art still has the power to create positive change.

Philip will be in conversation with Blake Society trustee, John Riordan.

‘An impassioned magnum opus celebrating Blake’s star-shaken genius by discovering his lineage everywhere in the author’s own crystal cabinet of artists and outlaws. A tremendous literary performance’ Iain Sinclair

‘Queer in all senses of the word’ Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boys

Philip Hoare’s books include Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward: A Biography; Wilde’s Last Stand, Spike Island, and England’s Lost Eden. Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. It was followed by The Sea Inside (2013), RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (2017) and Albert & the Whale (2021).