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Aleister Crowley was even more beastly than we’d imagined

20 August 2022

9:00 AM

20 August 2022

9:00 AM

The City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley Phil Baker

Strange Attractor Press, pp.342, 17.99

I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts for him to take as many drugs and have as much sex as he could. And he was a second-rate writer at best. When the novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall said he had gone ‘from Great Beast to Great Bore’, I thought it a fair summing-up.

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