MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
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
[Hamburger Kunsthalle/Private Collection/British Museum] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
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.
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