![f0058-01](https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/1ezl3m28sgc4exuy/images/file45RNKPSM.jpg)
![f0058-02](https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/1ezl3m28sgc4exuy/images/fileC998NVD7.jpg)
The English Soul: The Faith of a Nation
By Peter Ackroyd
Reaktion Books £20
As a boy in the 1760s, William Blake looked up and saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’.
That was at Peckham Rye in south London, on one of his solitary walks. Peter Ackroyd, himself haunted by the spirit of London, doesn't mention that a mural occupying the whole side of a house there, to commemorate the event, was