On 19 April we lost a great English visionary. I use the qualifier deliberately: JG Ballard, perplexed ever since his arrival as a youngster from Shanghai by his newly encountered homeland (see his memoir, Miracles of Life), by its absurd fixation on the past, seems ostensibly an alien observer, at odds with the literary and socio-political mainstream of England. And yet I see him as an exemplar of an English dissident tradition; the nearest comparison among writers might be with Blake.

I met ...
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