Throw off your "mind-forg’d manacles" and join Philip Hoare in this talk about the visionary artist, mystic and queer icon, William Blake.
Visionary. Poet. Revolutionary. Mystic.
William Blake , much misunderstood in his own time, has been the inspiration for generations of artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians drawn to his radical vision of absolute freedom. Blake’s work spans the worldly and the spiritual, merging humanity, nature, and the divine in fantastical ways.
Award-winning author Philip Hoare ’s powerful new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (pub. April 2025), shines the spotlight back onto Blake, reminding us that art still possesses the power to inspire and transform. Philip finds echoes of Blake’s visionary genius in artists including Paul Nash and Derek Jarman, in the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood, and in the poetry of W. B. Yeats – the latter two both members of the Order of the Golden Dawn.
So, throw off your "mind-forg’d manacles" and join us to learn about one of England's most remarkable and revolutionary 18th-/19th-century artists, in this illustrated online Zoom lecture (which will be followed by an audience Q&A session) from one of our finest contemporary writers.
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Philip Hoare is the author of nine books of non-fiction, including biographies of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, and England's Lost Eden (2005), about religious mania in the late-Victorian New Forest. Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and was followed by: The Sea Inside (2013); RisingTideFallingStar (2017), a literary love letter to David Bowie; and Albert and the Whale (2021), about the artist Albrecht Dürer. An experienced broadcaster and curator, Philip wrote and presented the BBC Arena programme The Hunt for Moby-Dick , directed three films for the BBC’s Whale Night , and organised The Moby-Dick and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Big Reads.
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell , author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019) . Ghostland , a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see:
https://edwardparnell.com
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Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[ Image: a fragment of Behemoth and Leviathan from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job , 1826.]
You may also like the following events from The Last Tuesday Society & The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities:
- This Wednesday, 25th June, 08:00 pm, Nordic Midsummer Stories - Lena Heide Brennand - Zoom in London, United Kingdom
- Next Monday, 30th June, 07:00 pm, Robert Kirk's "Secret Commonwealth of Elves & Fairies" - Domhnall Stiùbhart in London, United Kingdom
- This August, 11th August, 05:00 pm, BOOK LAUNCH - Mythical creatures in Scandinavian Folklore - LENA BRENNAND in London
