'Paulin is a liberating critic, who can solve in a throw-away line the kind of problem students and bewildered young poets carry about with them ...He is an urgent and passionate champion of the English dissenting tradition, which tradition was never more necessary, never more suppressed.' Kathleen Jamie, Independent on Sunday Tom Paulin is one of our leading and most controversial literary critics. In this brilliant series of linked essays he explores the tradition of dissent in English literature, from Elizabethan times to the present. Among the writers that fall under his luminous gaze are Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Defoe, Yeats, Blake, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Lawrence, Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney and Edward Said.