BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

The Magical Revival (1972) Kenneth Grant   The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages (2002) Brian Bates   Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009) Owen Davies   The Book Of English Magic (2009) Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate    There is no book quite like Kenneth Grant's Magical Revival . But what exactly is it? In some ways it is a conventional narrative of the 'new' Magical experiment that was introduced by the 'revelation' of Aiwass to Aleister Crowley in 1904. Grant takes us through to the Zos Kia Cultus of Austin Osman Spare who died in 1956. But this general narrative is overshadowed by the book's true purpose which is to do for Magic as a religious narrative what the Early Church Fathers did for Christianity - to express both its cogency and its mystery and so its high and serious purpose as a spiritual tradition, if not necessarily a religion in the formal sense. Nor can the corpus of work be wholly judged on this one wor

Eros and Thanatos (1999)   Klaus Bottger Forbidden Erotica (2000) Mark Lee Rotenberg Tom Poulton: The Secret Art of an English Gentleman (2006) Editor - Dian Hanson The ostensible purpose of Eros and Thanatos is to give us the work of Klaus Bottger, a German artist (1942-1992) whose ouevre of erotic prints has been picked up by the Erotic Prints Society in 1999 and padded out with an introduction and two pornographic short stories (by English writers) with a German theme - one set amongst the free love German student community of cliche and the other providing a mock psycho-analytic case study in which a brutal Freikorps soldier learns gemutlichkeit and leaves his bourgeois analyst in something of a disturbed erotic state. Bottger has talent but the work goes nowhere. While the stories have some some interest, they do not have great interest while the Germanic link between sex and death is laboured. It would have been far better to produce a slimmer book of prints with some

An Experiment With Time (1927, revised edition 1935) J W Dunne   13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time (2009) Michael Brooks   An Experiment With Time is a scientific and philosophical (and the author would like to think psychological) treatise on time in the context of the author's and others' experience of precognition in dreams. It is anomalous but it is also a serious if difficult book which has achieved cult status because it represented a sincere scientific attempt to deal with the problem of precognition at that point in history when spiritualism was already a memory amongst serious thinkers and the new physics had not yet fully established itself in the public's consciousness. However, it is a very difficult book indeed. The writer is at pains to be clear and he does a good job of this but you have to be of a mathematical or analytical bent to get anything out of this book and I am afraid that I am not.