: The London of Aleister Crowley
by Phil Baker
Foreword by Tim D’Arch Smith
5" x 8" approx
PB 304pp
A topographical narrative as elegantly constructed as Harry Beck’s schematic map of the London Undergound – an astonishing subterranean journey awaits, taking us through the myriad calling points of Crowley’s life, and this wicked city’s collective unconscious.
– Jake Arnott
City of the Beast presents an enthralling psychogeography of a London that is irrevocably lost. Piccadilly Circus was once deemed to be the absolute centre of the British Empire, and it and its immediately surrounding streets with their grand hotels, restaurants, cigar shops, gunsmiths and prostitutes were the favourite stamping ground of the tweed-knickerbocker-clad occultist Aleister Crowley. But Phil Baker’s thorough researches have also led him to other dimly lit streets that were thronged with Bohemians, charlatans, spongers, drug addicts, spiritualist cranks, would-be femmes fatales, yet more prostitutes and astral phantoms – so many lost souls. The map even extends to such territories as ‘Battersea, supreme word of malignity in the tongue of the pit’ (as Crowley had it). An unflinching light has been shed upon the sinister man-about town Crowley. A brilliant book.
– Robert Irwin
Fabulous…Baker presents Crowley as a man whose outlook was formed in the decadent 1890s, one who never really adapted to the changing world… ultimately a very human study.
– Peter Watts
“Baker is a scrupulous writer… turns the ridiculous into something darker and stranger.”
Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator
