Lear. O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!

Fool. Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ‘em i’ th’ paste alive. She knapp’d ‘em o’ th’ coxcombs with a stick and cried ‘Down, wantons, down!’ ‘Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.

BBC coverage (criticised for misrepresentation of the order of events) of the Battle of Orgreave:

A song about the Allendale Baal festival, which mentions some guisers:

“Guising” often traditionally involved “blacking up” with coal dust, soot or burnt cork.

“So events can slip from memory…”:

“The enemy within”:

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In “After Slumber” I’m trying to take a transversal slice across a thirty-year period (starting with Thatcher’s election in 1979), embedding it in a longer history of confrontations between Shelley’s “anarchy” (unfettered state power) and collective uprising. There are other games afoot, but that’s the main thread. Archaisms and snatches of folk memory are very much to the purpose, which is not to wallow in nostalgia but to summon latent energies.