Tom Holland
Rich, complex and original, Higgs takes us to places that even Blake himself might have found surprising.
The Financial Times
[Higgs's] is a systematizing imagination, able to harness disparate elements and find the patterns that animate them.
The Times (London)
A glittering stream of revelatory light. Conventional expectations are ripped to shreds. Higgs's prose has a diamond-hard clarity. He knows how to make us relate. Before long you will find you are examining yourself as much as you are examining Blake. Fascinating."
Mental Health Today
[Higgs] handles the complexities of Blake, particularly the later Blake, with adroit confidence, and in doing so he offers a crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction.”
The Spectator
Laudable. We cannot understand Blake without understanding what he meant by imagination or taking seriously his visions. Higgs does this admirably, by exploring what we know about the mind while maintaining, for our secular times, the sacred quality of Blake's attention.
Simon Russell Beale
Blake is a complete mystery to me, so I'm loving this book. You start to think: ‘Oh my God, that artist has been somewhere in my consciousness for the whole of my life, but I know absolutely nothing about them.’ There's a whole world just on my doorstep that I didn't realize existed.
From the Publisher
Advance praise for William Blake vs the World:
Times Literary Supplement
Higgs handles the complexities of Blake, particularly the later Blake, with adroit confidence, and in doing so he offers a crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction.
Terry Gilliam
Absolutely wonderful! This book managed to make Blake's mind and mythology understandable to me at last—for that I am truly grateful.
Iain Sinclair
Any careful reader must acknowledge the calm and the clarity of this spirited overview. Here is a guide who deserves to be seen as a contemporary Virgil, leading us around the circles of an inexhaustible theory of everything.
Robin Ince
John Higgs's work is always revelatory and William Blake vs the World is no different. It is a dynamic book that makes Blake vivid and relevant but which also tells us a great deal about all human imagination. The subject is not only Blake, it is ourselves.
