First published 2018
Roger Dobson possessed an extraordinary talent for uncovering the strangest corners of literary history. This collection gathers twenty of his essays that pursue fascinating questions about writers and their secrets. Dobson investigates how W.B. Yeats obtained a hair from Aleister Crowley's head through artist Althea Gyles. He examines what harsh lesson befell scholar and demonologist Reverend Montague Summers. He explores why Sherlock Holmes remained silent about his university days. The essays reveal an unexpected chronicler of decadent writers who counted Christine Keeler, Sir Oswald Mosely, Colin Wilson and various beat poets among his acquaintances. Dobson tracks Arthur Machen's fictional characters through London's mysterious landscapes, rediscovering their hideouts and vanished meeting places. He studies M.P. Shiel, Bulwer Lytton, George Gissing, and Jocelyn Brooke alongside other neglected authors whose rare books deserve wider recognition. Javier Marías called Dobson a remarkable man, both learned and bookish. These pieces celebrate readers who seek out kings, priests, melancholy poets, dandies, and forgotten writers in literature's most unusual territories.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, non-fiction, 21st-century, books-about-books, academic
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: London
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
301 pages · Paperback · Independently published