I n a recent skirmish in the current war on woke, John Milton’s Paradise Lost was caught in the crossfire. In December 2024, the scholar Orlando Reade’s book on the “revolutionary afterlife” of Milton ...

Alan Jacobs clarifies centuries of debate over John Milton’s epic retelling of the Fall. Christian life is rooted in a story with a specific plot. It begins with God’s creation of the world, builds ...

In his “biography” of Paradise Lost, which is part of Princeton University Press’s excellent Lives of Great Religious Books series, Alan Jacobs traces Johnson’s and others’ responses to Milton and his ...

Nobody knows why John Milton’s first wife left him in 1642 after only a few weeks of marriage. Perhaps the fact that the 33-year-old writer was twice the age of Mary Powell had something to do with it ...

It is hard not to like Satan. He is Western culture’s original rebel, the bad boy who dared to defy the authority of God. He also has the best lines. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n,” ...