Blood

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, Jonathan Bowden wrote 27 books, about which almost nothing was known until after his death. Combining cultural criticism with memoir, high journalism, and selected correspondence, these texts belong to no particular genre, the prose being allowed to roam where it may, drawing from many strands, finding unexpected links, and collecting shrewd insights along the way. More than anything, they are exercises in exploration and self-clarification, wherein one will find, as work in progress, many of the themes that would later emerge in his orations. The Jonathan Bowden Collection aims at making these obscure texts readily available for the first time, complete with annotations and indices, so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations interested in the dissidents at the margins of British intellectual life at the turn of our century. Blood covers a wide range of topics, including Western Marxism and Louis Althusser, the psychology of Satanism, National Socialism, the conduct of war, virtual reality, the adoption within the art world of Left-wing norms, the Situationist International, Stuart Home, Wyndham Lewis, and the tensions between art and totalitarian politics. The book ends with brief commentaries on then topical events: the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and the death of British artist Francis Bacon. This is not an essay in any conventional sense, but rather a succession of fervid and unpredictable snapshots that accrete into a panoramic overview of Western civilisation in the 20th century.