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AN OUTSIDER IN THE CITY: Colin Wilson's London with Colin Stanley At the Century Club - Soho W1 Tuesday the 27th June 2023 from 7 pm Colin Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931 wrote over 150 books on subjects as diverse as psychology, true crime, unexplained phenomena, pre-history, the occult, music and literature. He became a celebrity overnight at the age of 24 with the publication of “The Outsider”—a psycho-philosophical study of alienation in modern literature and thought - in 1956. In this talk, Colin Stanley, Wilson’s bibliographer, will focus on the author’s early years in London, before his sudden fame, and chronicle the evolution of what became his ‘big London novel’ - Ritual in the Dark - about a sadistic killer, based on Jack the Ripper and set in a 1950s London struggling to rebuild itself after the wartime Blitz. Wilson did meticulous research into the Whitehall murders and became a ‘Ripperologist’ (a term he coined). Ritual in the Dark drew on his experience of living in the capital and was largely written in the British Museum Reading Room (which features in many of Wilson’s novels) while he was sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath to save money. The novel was published in 1960 and was described by the critic Nicolas Tredell in 2011 as “an unsung achievement of post-war British fiction.” Tickets £12 - please click here to purchase |
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OTHER ACI EVENTS 2023: |
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