CHRISTOPHER HOWSE
The English Soul: The Faith of a Nation
By Peter Ackroyd
Reaktion Books £20
As a boy in the 1760s, William Blake looked up and saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’. That was at Peckham Rye in south London, on one of his solitary walks. Peter Ackroyd, himself haunted by the spirit of London, doesn’t mention that a mural occupying the whole side of a house there, to commemorate the event, was painted in 1993, only to be vandalised three years later. Perhaps that belongs to the uncharted history of the dark side of the English soul. Ackroyd wrote a biography of Blake in 1995, and almost every year since has produced a book or two on English history. Blake’s ‘vision has never been lost’ he declares now. ‘It is integral to the English soul.’ Discerning the English soul is here performed through 23 chapters of biographical sketches from Bede in the seventh century to the present...
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