Albion S Glory

Starting with William Blake's lost painting The Ancient Britons, this book shows how the visionary artist and poet reworked the Matter of Britain--the corpus of legends presenting an alternative history of Britain--into his own mythology. He thus adds to a tradition of Arthurian epic begun by Layamon in the 13th century and continued by Edmund Spenser in the 16th, in which a Romano-Celtic warlord becomes an icon of the English imagination. This book shows how Britain became the promised land of a pagan goddess where mythical events are as important as those of history, and how the figure of Arthur is transformed into a British Messiah whose Christian realm is in continuous interaction with the Otherworld of Faerie, an imagined place between the spiritual and the earthly. Arthur as perceived through Blake's vision is the earthly embodiment of the fallen Albion; this exploration of the mythic underpinnings of the English sense of nationhood reveals an imaginative consciousness that links us to "human existence itself."

My book begins with a brief consideration of what we mean by "English music" and what factors are involved. I explain the reasons behind my choice of composers for consideration, and for the omissions from the survey.

The anthology contains many of the best poems of Pete Brown, Dave Cunliffe, Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Spike Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Bernard Kops, Tom McGrath, Adrian Mitchell, Edwin Morgan, Neil Oram, Tom Pickard, Tom Raworth, Chris Torrance, Alex Trocchi, Gael Turnbull - and forty-seven others - from John Arden to Michael X -- rear cover.

The Sword of Albion concludes the most comprehensive and intimate life of Nelson ever written, one that teems with a glittering array of sailors and civilians, heroes and villains, husbands, wives and lovers. Here are Nelson's famous victories at the battles of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar as well as his lesser-known yet equally gripping campaigns. But behind the military prowess is a man riven with paradoxes and schisms: the fighting admiral and the glory-hunter, the national hero and the indigent commoner, the family man and the adulterer. This is an epic, triumphant and tragic life, and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

My book begins with a brief consideration of what we mean by “English music” and what factors are involved. I explain the reasons behind my choice of composers for consideration, and for the omissions from the survey.

The councilors had placed a book upon the table, its cover pale blue edged in silver. The title was The Theosophon. They slid it towards me. Philomena Wilcox, Ph.D., retired professor of music, pianist, passionate devotee of Russian composers like Scriabin and Rachmaninov, thinks she is merely editing a series of prolix journals by the desert recluse Blaise. One day in 2029 she took delivery of 7,000 pages of his arcane diary entries spanning a 20-year period. His story what he thinks and writes about is exceedingly odd, mystical, and perplexing. He is anticipating a planetary event to take place in 2033. Soon enough, Philomena discovers she, impossibly, is part of this story, in fact, will be a keystone in this epochal event. It's as if through the journal pages Blaise talks directly to her and pulls her into his world of wisdom-angels, geomantic patterns, and designer planets. The pages are encoded with activation triggers. Over a three-year period, she starts to remember her true story, her astonishing past. It's a nonstop tutorial in the Mysteries. Taught by the human Blaise and his angelic mentors, also called Blaise, seemingly right now, in the present moment. Except upwards of 35 years or more separate them in the world of linear time. Her familiar world starts to fall apart. The event is called the Theosophon. Blaise writes about it, but she designed it. That's startling enough, but Philomena is astonished to remember that she designed it eons ago in another galaxy. The Earth was created as a performance stage for it. The Theosophon is a multidimensional musical event involving the collective consciousness of humanity, the Earth, and the spiritual world. The overture of the fulfillment of the purpose of the Earth and humanity. Yes, Philomena is an integral part of this unique event, but it will cost her more than she ever thought possible.

This second volume of John Rule's major two-volume portrait of Georgian England is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of eighteenth-century society, incorporating the exciting new research findings of recent years. It deals in turn with the upper class, `middling sort' and lower orders; with popular education, religion and culture; with standards of living in town and country; and with crime, punishment and protest. The book, which is as rich and varied as the age it explores, ends with an assessment of continuity and change across the century.