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Orlando Reade is a writer from London. He studied English at Cambridge and Princeton, where he received his PhD in 2020. He has written about culture and politics for publications including Frieze, the Guardian, and the White Review, where he served as a contributing editor. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University London.
A testament to the enduring power of a great work of literature to inspire. * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* * [A] thoughtful, wide-ranging and astute book... A remarkable feat of distillation and elucidation… As a response to such a complex and equivocal historical figure [as Milton] neither hagiography nor iconoclasm seems quite adequate, and Reade’s excellent book strikes a difficult and deft balance between the two. * Observer * Clever, wide-ranging... Reade is an academic, but his book is mercifully unlike most academic works. It is witty and sardonic.... [Reade] is sensitive and shockable. -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * New Statesman * Eminently readable... Reade includes a wealth of curious detail * The Telegraph * If we ever needed a lesson about the challenges of freedom it is now. Orlando Reade’s passionate and illuminating account of the afterlives of Paradise Lost is an urgent reminder that freedom - in all senses - is poetry: there to be loved, resisted, re-worked and made to sing again for each new generation. -- Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of We Are Free to Change the World An admirably lucid new book * Independent * Fresh and arresting... What in Me is Dark is a lucid and sometimes moving reminder of how Milton’s epic, for all its pre-modern erudition and doctrinal complexity, has continually been given new life by its modern readers. * Literary Review * Orlando Reade's immensely readable history of the reception of Paradise Lost shows how Milton's great poem vaults across the centuries to meet new readers, its radicalism undimmed. -- Adam Smyth, author of The Book-Makers What in Me is Dark, with its brisk canter over a field as wild and varied as Milton's own masterpiece, will send readers back to the original text with a new sense of its paradoxes, beauties and continuing relevance. * Financial Times * Wonderfully written, intelligent and moving... Reade reminds us that literature is action, that epic poetry has the power to liberate minds, pens, and voices. Behind every revolution is a song. As it turns out, so often that song has been Paradise Lost. -- Leah Redmond Chang, author of Young Queens
