What we like best about trips to Britain (besides romping with old friends in and around Sheffield) is the opportunity to buy some great books. Here’s what I’ve picked up:

Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (Vintage, 1999)–An interesting read: I’d never heard of the Conjuror’s Magazine, or of Blake’s connection with James Gillray (they both attended the Royal Academy at the same time); nor did I know of Richard Cosway’s practice of sex magic and his friendship with the Blakes at about the same time. Finally–and call me naive–it took Peter Ackroyd to waken me enough from “Newton’s Sleep” to realize that Blake included engravings of two honest to god blowjobs in progress in his great poem Milton. The mystery is, why?

Four Restoration Libertine Plays, edited by Deborah Payne Fisk. Reading The Libertine by Thomas Shadwell right now.

Witchfinders; A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, by Malcolm Gaskill. The real story of Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Grim stuff.

The First Psychic by Peter Lamont. A generous take on D.D. Home–I think too generous.

The Herbalist; Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Reform by Benjamin Woolley (Harper, 2005)– By the same author who wrote so well about John Dee, this was a must-have and so far the reading is wonderful.

The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse–New names and new tropes aplenty.

Atila the Hun and Genghis Khan (Bantam)–both from John Mann–for my nomadic, pillaging moods.

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy–One of his least satisfying books. Some of the language is still there, but the plot reduces all of McCarthy’s epic themes to comic book proportions. McCarthy Lite, I guess you’d call this one, though the basic tenet is as dark as ever.