When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.
Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.
At breakneck pace and with wondrous detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the…
A book that features Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth and Steffi Grant, with Austin Osman Spare as a major character, is bound to be interesting. But it is Moore's language that makes it sublime. Fascinating!
A propulsive tour through a fantastical London, where history and myth collide, murder stalks the streets and the mundane becomes very magical indeed...
The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?
Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London…
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks…
India and the Occult explores the reception of Indian spirituality among Western occultists through case studies. In particular, it focuses on the British 20th century currents associated with Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Grant, and the related individuals and groups.
