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William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
Brief Description
Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker. ‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ — Olivia Laing ‘Queer in all senses of the word’ — Neil Tennant ‘A life-changing book’ — Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times ‘Fabulously idiosyncratic’...
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William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
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Description
Named a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times and Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Prospect, and New Yorker.
‘Undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece’ — Olivia Laing
‘Queer in all senses of the word’ — Neil Tennant
‘A life-changing book’ — Robert Douglas Fairhurst, The Times
‘Fabulously idiosyncratic’ — Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman
How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry, and protest.
Weaving between the historical, cultural, and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake.
In 1973, Derek Jarman set off from London to film the stones of Avebury. He was following in the footsteps of Paul Nash, who had photographed the ancient megaliths a generation before. Standing in that muddy field, by those stones, both artists had felt a direct connection to their hero – a man who had died a long, long time ago, yet who remained electrically alive to them.
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 twentieth-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.
‘A book that is neither Blake biography nor critical analysis nor legacy-tracing nor personal odyssey but a capacious mixing of them all … a joyful and dizzying romp’ — Philip Marsden, Spectator
‘This love letter to William Blake couldn’t be more eccentric … Philip Hoare’s weird and wonderful style soars in this study of the poet and his disciples’ — Ian Sansom, Telegraph
‘Hoare’s impassioned style, alive with metaphor and wordplay, has often been called “dreamlike”. This is apt, given his total immersion in his subject … Nothing will be as audacious or intriguing as William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love’ — Jenny Uglow, Times Literary Supplement
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780008534387
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 26 February 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Fourth Estate Ltd
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 40.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 420g
Pages: 464
About the Author
Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.
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