'Fascinating' The Times
'Blakeian in its singularity' New Statesman
'A wonderful adventure' Irish Times
'Rich, complex and original' Tom Holland
'A crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction' Times Literary Supplement

Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work - and, crucially, his mind. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context and shows us how Blake can help us better understand ourselves.

"John Higgs's book lets in a glittering stream of revelatory light . . . [he] has us wrestling with flow states and default mode networks, Newtonian world views, synaesthesia and Jungian shadows. Conventional expectations are ripped to shreds. Higgs's prose has a diamond-hard clarity. He knows how to make us relate. Before long you will find you are examining yourself as much as you are examining Blake . . . Fascinating" - THE TIMES

"John Higgs argues that we have absorbed Blake into our national consciousness without having the faintest idea of who he was or what he believed in. Higgs's mission, to return to the cockney visionary and his essential strangeness, is Blakeian in its singularity" - NEW STATESMAN, Books of the Year

"Blake is a complete mystery to me so I'm loving this book, which charts Blake's extraordinary imaginative life - this mythological reading of reality that he invented, or discovered. You start to think: "Oh my God, that artist has been somewhere in my consciousness for the whole of my life, but I know absolutely nothing about them." There's a whole world just on my doorstep that I didn't realise existed" - OBSERVER

"Laudable . . . We cannot understand Blake without understanding what he meant by imagination or taking seriously his visions. Higgs does this admirably, by exploring what we know about the mind while maintaining, for our secular times, the sacred quality of Blake's attention" - SPECTATOR

"Drawing on up-to-date psychological research, Higgs grasps the essence of Blake and makes it as comprehensible as it is ever likely to be for a non-specialist audience. I have read many books about Blake over the years, but this feels like the only one that remotely bottles the magic; with this book Higgs has reached a completely new level" - FORTEAN TIMES

"A wonderful adventure in politics, art and spiritualty. Comparative religion, neurobiology and even quantum physics are all deployed to better understand a misunderstood genius" - Irish Times, Books of the Year

"Higgs handles the complexities of Blake, particularly the later Blake, with adroit confidence, and in doing so he offers a crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction" - TLS

"Higgs's writing is consistently clear and confident . . . [he] rightly and persuasively emphasizes the primacy and power of the imagination in Blake's work . . . it was fun to witness Higgs's cogs turning, to hear his thoughts ricocheting against the walls of his internal archive of affinities, allusions and absorptions" - NEW YORK TIMES

"Invaluable and timely . . . Higgs's book greatly contributes to our contemporary appreciation of Blake" - SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

"[Higgs] handles the complexities of Blake, particularly the later Blake, with adroit confidence, and in doing so he offers a crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction" - MENTAL HEALTH TODAY

"[Higgs's] is a systematising imagination, able to harness disparate elements and find the patterns that animate them" - FINANCIAL TIMES