About John Broadbent: Colonel John Broadbent was a British army officer and Conservative politician.
Milton's learned vocabulary [...] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child.
He would have been half-hanged, taken down alive, castrated, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, his stomach slit open, and his intestines taken out and burnt, and his carcase chopped into four quarters.
