Austin Osman Spare

“Phil Baker’s study is a first-rate performance, scrupulously researched, judicious and refreshingly sane… Spare comes to seem a strangely attractive figure: talented, stoical, randy, cantankerous, gentle and a magnificent English eccentric.”
—The Literary Review

”[Told with] zest and insight… Ever determined to break down the barriers between reality and fantasy, Spare has finally achieved it—not by elaborate psychic exercises, but through biography.”
—Matthew Sturgis, Times Literary Supplement

“I cannot recommend Austin Osman Spare too highly. Phil Baker has done a wonderful job of bringing the complexities and contradictions of Spare’s life to the fore, and in making the London of Spare’s time come to life vividly and richly.”
—Phil Hine, enfolding.org

“Phil Baker’s book is excellent; it’s the one many Spare enthusiasts such as I had been waiting for.”
—John Coulthart, London Society Journal

“So many of Spare’s works look like sketches for a masterwork rather than the finished article. Perhaps the finished article was Spare’s life itself, an extraordnary carnival of strange chacters and incidents, some of them semi-mythical. It is as good as a novel.”
—Reggie Oliver, Wormwood

Phil Baker is a writer based in London. His books include The Devil Is a Gentleman - The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley and Austin Osman Spare - The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (Strange Attractor), called by Alan Moore “little short of marvelous.”

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