Word: miltonic
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Ackroyd's vividly human More is Arthurian rather than canonical, imperfect yet inspiring. And that is the gloss that Ackroyd develops in what may be called a fantastic sequel to More--even though it was published one year earlier. In the novel Milton in America, Ackroyd has the 17th century Puritan poet and radical escaping to New England after the collapse of the English revolution that he helped foment--itself a catastrophic result of the Protestantism set loose by Henry VIII's divorce. Instead of writing Paradise Lost, the blind and defeated rebel arrives near Plymouth...
...Milton is a perfect and delicious literary counterweight to More. And both the history and the fiction emanate from and complement Ackroyd's 1996 biography of the late 18th century poet and artist William Blake, who cast himself as Milton in the epic of the same name to redeem the older poet. Blake's works remythify Britain, replacing an imposed sanctity with the rediscovery of sacredness. Blake begins the restoration of God's calendar by pointing out that there is "a moment in each day that Satan cannot find...
There is this consistent emblem in Ackroyd's More and Milton and Blake: London is the pivot into eternity. More's city, piously Catholic, fades into Camelot-like legend, shunned yet desired by Milton, who cannot regain it, all his monumental words raising only a pandemonium finally becalmed by Blake, who walks its shadows to find the city become Jerusalem. All three men were Londoners--as is Ackroyd. "It's always been ugly, a vandalized city," the novelist and biographer said recently. "But I hope it stays that way because that's its nature." His next book, he says, will...
...recessions, had tremendous influence over economic policy through the Depression and in the years after World War II. Although his name is back in vogue as many nations cope with the most serious economic crisis since the Depression, my own vote for economist of the century goes to Milton Friedman, whose books, including Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (written with his wife Rose), articulate the importance of free markets and the dangers of undue government intervention. Our list, recognizing only 20 people, is by definition subjective, especially since we sought to recognize leadership in several different industries...
...company had retreated from human contact "manye hundred yeres ago," but their popular life continued to be irrepressible. Shakespeare is full of them--A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest. They pullulate as sylphs in Pope's Rape of the Lock; they appear in the verses of Drayton, Herrick, Milton, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley and Blake. Indeed, whenever national origins were celebrated under the aegis of the Romantic movement, with its passion for the primitive and antiquarian, there the fairies (a.k.a. trolls, elves, pixies, leprechauns, peris) would...