John Milton went blind, lost the political cause he had spent decades fighting for, and dictated the greatest epic poem in English to his daughters from memory. Paradise Lost was composed in total darkness by a defeated revolutionary whose Satan may be literature's most autobiographical villain.

This episode traces Milton from his Puritan education through Cromwell's service, the blindness, and the dictation of Paradise Lost.

• Milton's revolutionary pamphlets and service as Cromwell's propagandist
• The blindness and Restoration that made him a hunted man
• Dictating Paradise Lost from memory in total darkness
• Satan as the most compelling and autobiographical character in the epic