Paradise Lost (Books I to VI)

I first tried Paradise Lost as a student, eager to dig into all the references and understand the greatness of the great work.

That didn’t last very long. The gathering of Demons had too many references and allusions, and soon I was lost in the reeds and lost interest.

Yet somehow or other, Paradise Lost came back to my life. One of my colleagues studied English at university and had a habit of making impressive quotations from it in conversation. Another asked us to guess a book’s name from a picture, which is “parrots’ eyes lost and parrots’ eyes regained”.

So I gave it another go.

This time round, as I go through the lines in my mind, it is Stephen Fry’s (Reginald) Jeeves reading them out loud. It became much more enjoyable: a silent audio book ideal for the underground.