The Latest Breaking News from William Blake

The temptation to chuck out the old is strong, but can only be part of the answer

In reading for my festschrift essay for John Witte ("The Influence of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on the Common Law"), I ran across this fascinating paragraph by Anthony Grafton on how Johannes Kepler didn't publish a monograph on chronology (i.e., the study of historical dates) but instead developed his scholarship…

Amy Winehouse, James Dean, Nikita Khrushchev … Scott Covert takes rubbings at big names’ graves, often getting chased away. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he says, ‘when I hear someone’s been cremated’

As Complicité’s Simon McBurney brings Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist detective story to the stage, the pair discuss its eccentric sleuth, isolated landscape and climate alarm

Inspired by William Blake and Francis Bacon, Ishag traces winding webs of families and friendships with depictions of plants, neighbourhoods and – her main subject – women

Why is Jerusalem lumped in with the jingoism of Last Night of the Proms? William Blake wrote a heretical, anti-establishment anthem that was later gifted to the suffragists and used to rouse fighters in the Spanish civil war

“To see a world in a grain of sand”, the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do.

When William Blake described England’s “green and pleasant land” in his poem Jerusalem, he was actually writing during a prolonged drought. Two centuries later, much of Europe is withering under successive heatwaves amid one of the most extreme droughts ever recorded.

Team England will not sing the UK's national anthem in Birmingham