Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot
By Anna Beer
Bloomsbury £20, 480 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

In the opening paragraph of “Paradise Lost” Milton declared that his “advent’rous song” would pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”. The poem was composed in the wake of a similarly “advent’rous” experiment in politics that finally came to grief in the years following Cromwell’s death in 1658. As one of the chief apologists for the Commonwealth, Milton was high on the most wanted list of vindictive Royalists when Charles II assumed the throne in 1660.