Phil Baker: City of the Beast

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Exciting news of a new book by Phil Baker, biographer of Austin Osman Spare and Dennis Wheatley, with a Foreword by Timothy D’Arch Smith. Due for publication by Strange Attractor Press in November 2021, City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley is a work that combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley’s life in London.

“I dreamed I was paying a visit to London,” Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, “It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume.” Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn.

Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow Crowley as he searches for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinks absinthe and eats Chinese food in Soho, and find himself down on his luck in Paddington Green—and never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: “the abiding rapture,” he wrote in his diary, “which makes a ‘bus in the street sound like an angel choir!”

Source: City of the Beast | The MIT Press

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William Thirteen

just when i thought it was safe to put my wallet away….

Alan_OBrien

I agree. The book sounds VERY good by a talented writer.
The cover shows Regent Street. The Cafe Royal is on the right, the Great Beast would have live on the left at Jermyn Street.

William Thirteen

indeed i have enjoyed Phil Baker’s books in the past and find his style quite pleasant.

the_real_simon_iff

Great news. I have been to Christina Oakley’s “Crowley’s London” speech 20 years ago and there are soooo many good London stories about him! Very much looking forward to this.

Falcon

Looks very interesting. I’ve just pre-ordered a copy from Amazon (UK). I have been to meetings and talks held by the retro 1920s/1930s New Sheridan Club at the Wheatsheaf in London, and their newsletter says that AC and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas frequented the public house on occasion…

Horemakhet

Thanks for the heads-up, Paul. Preordered. With this & Tobias’s new volume it’ll be a merry Crowleymas in 2021!