Phil Baker - City of the Beast

On 8th September we are delighted to be joined by author Phil Baker for a presentation of his latest book "City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley".

“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…