Poet, painter, engraver and visionary, William Blake was a radical spirit fired by genius. This work shows Blake in the context of his period - caught up in the Gordon Riots, excited by the French Revolution and attracted by various forms of spiritual radicalism and sexual magic. It reveals the true affinities between Blake's art and his poetry, and recreates the atmosphere of 18th-century London.
Author Biography
Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.
