What in Me is Dark

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

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

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

Orlando Reade writes with exhilarating style, luminous clarity, and irreverent wit. Each page of What in Me Is Dark is aflame with ideas — on the relation between politics and evil, abolition and poetry—and with the sublimity of Milton's verse, deftly brought alive. Earth may be hell, but fallen angels, as Reade shows, have been our unexpected guides toward freedom and justice.

Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods

This is a rare and extraordinary book. In tracing the surprising revolutionary legacy of Milton’s epic, Reade has himself produced a liberatory text. This is not only a book for Milton scholars, but anyone invested in the poetics of freedom struggle.

Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous

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

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

Eminently readable... Reade includes a wealth of curious detail

The Telegraph

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

An admirably lucid new book

Independent

[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

A testament to the enduring power of a great work of literature to inspire.

Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

Rare and refreshing... gloriously and uniquely about disobedience – both in human and cosmic terms.

The Spectator

Few literary works have inspired such disparate interpretations and readings, and Reade makes a convincing case for Paradise Lost’s enduring legacy

Independent, *Books of the Year*

A pulsing reappraisal

Big Issue, *Books of the Year*

Lively and humane, Reade is the friendliest of academics. Like many an English literature undergraduate, he was initially daunted by Paradise Lost…but came to adore it while teaching poetry to prisoners, and he wants you to love it, too… Reade’s enthusiasm and curiosity are winning

Guardian, *Book of the Day*

A brilliant close reading of Milton’s verse. Reade possesses a sharp eye for the details of Milton’s verse and his writing crackles with imaginative energy

The Times

Reade wears his smarts very lightly: the book is a borderline romp… and very funny

Drum, *Summer Reads of 2025*