Austin Osman Spare, revised edition

Phil Baker has established himself as among the very best contemporary biographers… What Baker has accomplished here is little short of marvellous.

Alan Moore

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

Baker is a wonderful writer, careful, intelligent and dry. He also knows his London, and the Spare that emerges in his portrayal is very much an avatar of that unique and ancient town: humble Cockney beginnings, the bright years as a smoldering wunderkind, and then a long plunge into poverty, obscurity, and a deep weirdness…

Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and Nomad Codes

[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 has written an elegant and comprehensive biography, and his deep sympathy for his subject is nicely balanced by his scepticism towards some of Spare's sources of esoteric thought. There is a wealth of detail here … A stunning tribute to an unjustly neglected artist

Noel Rooney, Fortean Times

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