Phil Baker – ‘City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley’

How did you come about writing this book and where did you find his diary entries?

I'd always been kind of interested in Crowley since I was a teenager.

I think it started with reading the fiction books of Dennis Wheatley, his black magic thrillers, when I was about 12.

And I came back to all that later.

And in a weird way, by the time I'd come back to it, it was from an interest in the 1960s and the hippie era and the era of kind of boutiques.

Because that whole era, there was a big magical revival going on.

And Crowley was very big during that.

I mean, he's on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper magazine.

Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Crowley enthusiast.

He bought Crowley's old house by the shores of Loch Ness.

So it was also by then a kind of nostalgia for the 60s, which wasn't a period I really experienced.

But it's that fascination with the recent past, I suppose.

So I'd always kind of known about Crowley, and he figures in my other books, he's got a kind of at least a walk-on part in all the others.

So it was kind of time to do something about him on his own.

And during lockdown, with nothing to do in 2020...

I suddenly thought, well, I could do this book and I could probably knock it out quite quickly because they normally take me 10 years.

And this one I knocked out in a few months during lockdown and it came out very well.

So it's good.

And where did you get the diaries from?

I have a friend in America who is the head of the Order of the Temple of the Orient.

So he's got very privileged access to the diaries.

He's got the copyright of them as well.

Bill Breeze of the OTO.

But I also help him a little bit with the diaries because he's editing them.

And I have some input on the London side of things, addresses and just stuff about British life and Crowley's time in London.