If you enjoyed the Spectator's podcasts, why not subscribe to the magazine as well?

You can get 12 weeks of The Spectator for just £12, plus a free £20 £10,000 or weight raise voucher.

If you go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

This is a podcast-only deal, and we hope you take us up on it.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week, my guest is the writer Orlando, Read.

His new book is called What In Me is Dark, the Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost.

And it's a fascinating discussion of the afterlife of Milton's great epic in all sorts of different circumstances and ages.

Now, Orlando, this book sort of starts with you in this very strange situation where you're doing postgraduate work at

Princeton and you're also teaching in a correctional facility. Can you talk a bit about how

that shaped the jumping off point for the book, if that makes sense? Yes, absolutely. As you say,

I was doing my PhD at Princeton and some time before

some faculty and students at Princeton had established a volunteer program to teach in

correctional facilities in New Jersey. And it was a very well-run prison statewide prison education program

that that university program fitted into so I had the opportunity during my PhD to start

teaching in prisons and that was something that I ended up doing for five years.

As soon as I started, I didn't want to stop doing it because it felt so rewarding and interesting.

And when I came to write this book, I'd moved back to England.

So that chapter of my life had finished.

And so I was able to kind of look back on it as a sort of completed experience and to see how over time the experience of teaching, a group of students who were so different to me

and who didn't share necessarily my assumptions

...