The Glory Of Arthur

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."

The second volume of the three-volume history described by RandR Book News under the ISBN for Volume 1 (006-6). Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Rapture and rebellion! A grail quest and a boy's public school torment. Written between 1899 and 1908 but unpublished until 1922, The Secret Glory is said to have influenced John Betjeman and is mentioned in his autobiographical blank-verse Summoned by Bells. Ambrose Meyrick becomes a model pupil following a sadistic beating at his public school, Lupton. He works hard at his classics and even plays rocker with relish. Memories of country walks with his father, the stories of Ilar Sant and an unforgettable visit to Mr Cradock are never far from his mind. He lives two eager lives, the outer school life and a deeper inner life in which he sees everything transfigured into a radiant glory.

Arthur Rhys Davids was shot down and killed in October 1917. He was just twenty and had been flying over the Western Front with 56 Squadron for six months. He had entered the Royal Flying Corps direct from Eton College. In his brief operational career he was awarded the Military Cross twice and the Distinguished Service Order once. In the opinion of the commanding officer of his squadron he deserved the Victoria Cross. He came to public fame through shooting down the German ace Werner Voss. Rhys Davids was more than an outstanding fighter pilot, he was a man of thought as well as a man of action. Coming from an intellectual family, he was a brilliant classicist and popular with his fellow pilots in the RFC including James McCudden. Alex Revell has written a sensitive and deeply moving biography. It is based on letters from Rhys Davids early boyhood days at Eton to his last letter written on the night before he died.

Arthur White was a World Champion power-lifter, a successful businessman and happy family man. Until his life spirals out of control. Cocaine, steroids and an affair change everything. Arthur loses his business and his family and his own health is severely threatened. Death seems the only way out until an incident with a knife... Arthur's story is straight out of the annals of an East End crime thriller and his conversion to the Christian faith dramatically demonstrates the reality of God's amazing grace.