I’ve got a number of brief quote-posts queued up for the next week, and a couple of slightly longer ones, but I won’t be around. I’m off Monday for a brief writing retreat, to see if I can finish a complete draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost … which has been fun to write but also immensely challenging. It occurred to me the other day that if I had to rewrite the book using nothing I have used so far — none of the facts about Milton’s life, none of the quotations from Paradise Lost, none of the references to later readers and writers — I could easily do it. That’s how much material there is to draw on. And I have to keep the whole thing to 50,000 words!