The Devil is a Gentleman (Dark Masters)
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Biography/Dark Masters) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"thoroughly entertaining... fascinating" --Sunday Times, October 25, 2009
"a terrific read" -- Luke Jennings, The Observer, November 8, 2009
"brilliantly illuminating" - Michael Gove, -- The Times, November 16, 2009
"a treat" - Independent Fifty Best Winter Reads --Independent, November 14, 2009
"excellent... Although the whole of his career is explored... the fullest analysis is saved - quite rightly - for the novels that deal with Satanism..." - Professor Ronald Hutton
--Times Literary Supplement, December 11, 2009
"... masterful account of a writer's internal and external selves... difficult to imagine a more sensitive and knowledgeable investigation. Black magic stories? That was the least of it..."
--Fortean Times 263, June 2010
"a terrific read" -- Luke Jennings, The Observer, November 8, 2009
"brilliantly illuminating" - Michael Gove, -- The Times, November 16, 2009
"a treat" - Independent Fifty Best Winter Reads --Independent, November 14, 2009
"excellent... Although the whole of his career is explored... the fullest analysis is saved - quite rightly - for the novels that deal with Satanism..." - Professor Ronald Hutton
--Times Literary Supplement, December 11, 2009
"... masterful account of a writer's internal and external selves... difficult to imagine a more sensitive and knowledgeable investigation. Black magic stories? That was the least of it..."
--Fortean Times 263, June 2010
Product Description
One of the giants of popular fiction, with total sales of around fifty million books, Dennis Wheatley held twentieth-century Britain spellbound. His Black Magic novels like The Devil Rides Out created an oddly seductive and luxurious vision of Satanism, but in reality he was as interested in politics as occultism. Wheatley was closely involved with the secret intelligence community, and this powerfully researched study shows just how directly this drove his work, from his unlikely warnings about the menace of Satanic Trade Unionism to his role in a British scheme to engineer a revival of Islam.
Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Phil Baker examines Wheatley’s key friendship with a fraudster named Eric Gordon Tombe, and uncovers the full story of his sensational 1922 murder. Baker also explores Wheatley’s relationships with occult figures such as Rollo Ahmed, Aleister Crowley, and the Reverend Montague Summers, the shady priest and demonologist who inspired the memorably evil character of Canon Copely-Syle, in To The Devil – A Daughter.
Like Sax Rohmer and John Buchan, Wheatley has now moved from being dated to positively vintage, and this groundbreaking biography offers a major reassessment of his significance and status.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Definitive Wheatley biography,
By
This review is from: The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Biography/Dark Masters) (Hardcover)
Dennis Wheatley led a fascinating life, both as a writer and a war planner, and it's high time a decent biography of him was published. This is it. Despite Wheatley having written several volumes of revealing memoir, this book is a must for anyone interested in his life. Wheatley was often vague on dates, especially for the latter part of his life, and was not the person to put his own life into meaningful context. Phil Baker's biography is a great read, but is also invaluable as a reference tool, as it is meticulously researched and sourced, and uncovers all sorts of intriguing connections in the literary, cinematic and military fields. At this length, it's perhaps not a book to take to the beach and read in one sitting: it is more of a rich meal to savour over time. The writing is lively and often laconic - Baker is as attuned to literary establishment snobbery as he is to Wheatley's own pretensions - but it is his hard work in reference libraries and newspaper archives that has really paid off, and which makes this the definitive Wheatley biography.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterly achievement,
By
This review is from: The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Biography/Dark Masters) (Hardcover)
This biography has surprises as strange and as unexpected as anything in Wheatley's own novels. Meticulously researched, Baker never stifles his material by presenting it as dreary facts, but vividly and deftly creates an entirely credible portrait of Wheatley in the round, with an enviable lightness of style.
A book worthy of its subject, and likely to be one of the biographies of the year.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dennis and All His Works,
By
This review is from: The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Biography/Dark Masters) (Hardcover)
As a lifelong enthusiast of supernatural and occult fiction I've tried at various times to enjoy Dennis Wheatley's books, with little success. But I know enough about the history of magic to recognise the crucial role that Wheatley played in shaping the occult imagination of the 20th century, and so, somewhat daunted by its 700-page girth, I began reading Phil Baker's biography of the man who put smoking jackets on Satanists and made black magic seem like a wise career choice for many a dreaming teen. I needn't have worried - this is one of the most entertaining books I've read in years and also one of the most lucidly fascinating and effortlessly informative. In a tone that is alternately warm and wry, sympathetic and scandalous, Baker transports us into a bygone world of genteel bigotry, social climbing, institutionalised xenophobia and the fear of the devil himself. Wheatley himself is portrayed as an engaging product of pre-war Britain, one who sought in his fiction to reflect the world as he thought it ought to be, but found that world slipping away from him even faster than he could knock out novels. But Baker's book is about more than just Wheatley himself. We learn a great deal about the man and his times through the other characters he comes into contact with - prominent among them his mentor, the Niven-esque underworld chancer Eric Tombe, and a supporting cast of upper class fascists, eccentrics and occultists - some of them, like MI5 founder Maxwell Knight and Tank Pioneer Captain John Fuller, all three at once. I was genuinely sad to see Wheatley go at this wonderful book's end and, as a measure of the biography's success, I was so flushed with enthusiasm for Dennis and all his works, that I immediately bought a copy of The Devil Rides Out and began reading it. I gave up after 30 pages.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
