Writers, artists, philosophers and other luminaries referenced in The Hampstead Underworld.
By Adam Daly.
Alain Badiou. Still-living greatest thinker, putting road-sweepers on a par with University Professors.
Al Alvarez. Wished he was dead on the Heath when young, praised Plath, and wrote into the 21st C.
Arthur Koestler. Austrian author of Darkness At Noon and The Thirteenth Tribe, who had an affair with Michael Foot’s wife Jill Craigie, and confounded academics with his heterodox prolixity.
Adam Daly. Little known local sleuth and sutler in the shades, finally surfacing at long last!
Arnold Arnold. Scruffy Jewish-American Boho, who missed the Nobel for a Binary Code solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem based on noughts and crosses, and then duly vanished without trace.
Andrew Orolin. Destitute Hungarian black magician and radical fascist, who claimed to have solved the problem of the magic square and to have developed a mathematical formula stating that 30,000 was the optimal human population, and who tried to develop a death-ray inside his own brain.
Archibald Ziegler. Dishevelled Austrian emigre artist, envisioning helicopters as insects.
By Adam Daly.
Alain Badiou. Still-living greatest thinker, putting road-sweepers on a par with University Professors.
Al Alvarez. Wished he was dead on the Heath when young, praised Plath, and wrote into the 21st C.
Arthur Koestler. Austrian author of Darkness At Noon and The Thirteenth Tribe, who had an affair with Michael Foot’s wife Jill Craigie, and confounded academics with his heterodox prolixity.
Adam Daly. Little known local sleuth and sutler in the shades, finally surfacing at long last!
Arnold Arnold. Scruffy Jewish-American Boho, who missed the Nobel for a Binary Code solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem based on noughts and crosses, and then duly vanished without trace.
Andrew Orolin. Destitute Hungarian black magician and radical fascist, who claimed to have solved the problem of the magic square and to have developed a mathematical formula stating that 30,000 was the optimal human population, and who tried to develop a death-ray inside his own brain.
Archibald Ziegler. Dishevelled Austrian emigre artist, envisioning helicopters as insects.
Bram Stoker. Set the Bloofer Lady trapping scene in Dracula in St. John’s ‘new’ Cemetery.
Bronco. He never told me his name. I heard it from a nurse at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead where he died about twenty years ago that his name was John Cork. I remember some people calling him John at the time. The nurse also told me that he had lost the will to live and that he had to be force-fed. Bohemia personified. The Ironfoot Jack of Hampstead.
Bob Parks. Total one off original. Phenomenon extraordinaire. The reincarnation of Joshua. I hesitate to call him an 'artist' however, because he insists he is an 'anti-artist'
Colin Wilson. Slept in a tent on the Heath in the 1950’s whilst incubating The Outsider in my infancy.
Charles Wehner. Eccentric, unknown genius inventor of computer programmes, integrated circuits, and his own website, who thought Christ discovered hormones, and who re-introduced the Ether.
D.H. Lawrence. Ranted wildly and wrote The Rainbow whilst lodging in The Vale Of Health.
Dr. Frederick Grubb. Goggle-eyed radical poet in a donkey-jacket, scribbling himself into obscurity.
David Peters. A cross between a tramp and an Ancient Briton, who’d walked all the leys of the land, developed his own language, had Shamanic powers, wrote reams of notebooks, slept in graveyards dreaming of medieval kings, could eat absolutely anything, and destroyed a psychiatrist’s mind.
Elias Canetti. Ferociously cerebral, Germanic Old fox of the pre-war Vienna style, Hampstead café society, and Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, who I never quite dared introduce myself to once.
Edith Sitwell. The Edwardian High Bohemian Priestess of the Arts. The grand old dame of English letters. Eccentric underrated poet. She spent her last days in the Greenhill Flats. I had a soft spot for her.
George Orwell. Wrote Homage to Catalonia next to the Heath in 1936, and scowled in a bookshop.
G.B. Shaw. Visited the Red Webbs, and dreamed the Nietzschean Man And Superman on the Heath.
George Romney. Spawned Emma Hamilton in robes, dreamt Religious paintings, and left.
George Morland. Drunken Romantic Period visionary, who painted the Heath and died.
George Du Maurier. Lived in The Grove in the late 19th. C. and created Zvengali in Trilby.
Bronco. He never told me his name. I heard it from a nurse at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead where he died about twenty years ago that his name was John Cork. I remember some people calling him John at the time. The nurse also told me that he had lost the will to live and that he had to be force-fed. Bohemia personified. The Ironfoot Jack of Hampstead.
Bob Parks. Total one off original. Phenomenon extraordinaire. The reincarnation of Joshua. I hesitate to call him an 'artist' however, because he insists he is an 'anti-artist'
Colin Wilson. Slept in a tent on the Heath in the 1950’s whilst incubating The Outsider in my infancy.
Charles Wehner. Eccentric, unknown genius inventor of computer programmes, integrated circuits, and his own website, who thought Christ discovered hormones, and who re-introduced the Ether.
D.H. Lawrence. Ranted wildly and wrote The Rainbow whilst lodging in The Vale Of Health.
Dr. Frederick Grubb. Goggle-eyed radical poet in a donkey-jacket, scribbling himself into obscurity.
David Peters. A cross between a tramp and an Ancient Briton, who’d walked all the leys of the land, developed his own language, had Shamanic powers, wrote reams of notebooks, slept in graveyards dreaming of medieval kings, could eat absolutely anything, and destroyed a psychiatrist’s mind.
Elias Canetti. Ferociously cerebral, Germanic Old fox of the pre-war Vienna style, Hampstead café society, and Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, who I never quite dared introduce myself to once.
Edith Sitwell. The Edwardian High Bohemian Priestess of the Arts. The grand old dame of English letters. Eccentric underrated poet. She spent her last days in the Greenhill Flats. I had a soft spot for her.
George Orwell. Wrote Homage to Catalonia next to the Heath in 1936, and scowled in a bookshop.
G.B. Shaw. Visited the Red Webbs, and dreamed the Nietzschean Man And Superman on the Heath.
George Romney. Spawned Emma Hamilton in robes, dreamt Religious paintings, and left.
George Morland. Drunken Romantic Period visionary, who painted the Heath and died.
George Du Maurier. Lived in The Grove in the late 19th. C. and created Zvengali in Trilby.
John Constable. Studied Hampstead’s black and other clouds and saw a vision of Harrow.
John Keats. Spent his tubercular twilight in his ‘Grove’, writing Ode To A Nightingale in the garden.
Joshua. Barefoot, skip-be-robed, lion-maned and prophet-bearded Messiah of the Millennium, who didn’t do surnames, spread Revolution and Evolution in equal measure, was a King of the Squatters, believed he was immortal, eclipsed the Equinoxes, and once tried to march on Downing Street.
Katherine Mansfield. Out-wrote Virginia Woolf in East Heath Rd. gelling savagely with Lawrence.
Kingsley Amis. Drunken Literatus of the Flask Pub, who staggered past me once in a state of hopeless inebriation in Flask Walk, never foregoing such pleasures purely for the sake of spending a few extra years in an old people’s home in Weston-Supermare or making a sober appraisal of his son’s work.
Leigh Hunt. Lived in the Vale of Health in the 1810s, and was jailed for insulting the Prince Regent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Great mystic Viennese oddball criss-crossing Cambridge for an Infinitist map.
Michael Foot. Byron scholar, failed politician, dog-walker, and last of the left-wing Intellectuals.
M.P. Shiel. Fantastical Edwardian Author of Prince Zaleski and Xelusha; also The Purple Cloud, whose main protagonist, Arthur Jepson, briefly inhabits Hampstead like Mary Shelley’s Last Man.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Great straddler of the Divide between classical twilight and modern dawn.
Karl Marx. Great Revolutionary Apostle, re-thinking the old world anew, from Hegel to Highgate.
Peter Vansittart. Eminence grise of 20th. C English Letters, who housed deserving poor geniuses.
R.L. Stephenson. Lived in/on The Mount in the late 19th. C. splitting himself in Jekyll And Hyde.
Stanley Spencer. Once upped sticks from Cookham to the Vale of Health, in his pyjamas.
Samuel Johnson. Great ‘Egadder!’ of the Kit-Kat Club, conceiving ‘London’ in the fields and lanes.
S.T. Coleridge. Lived in Highgate Grove from 1816, tramping on the Heath regularly high on opium.
Ted Honderich. Post-Marxist philosopher. Still-living scourge of all establishments, once calling Roger Scruton a cunt.
Wilkie Collins. Lived in Church Row in the mid-19th. C. and created ‘The Woman In White’.
William Blake. Visionary visitor to Wylde’s Farm in the 1820’s, painted by John Linnell with a stick.
William Empson. Begoggled, grizzly-haired literary scholar and poet, and seven way anatomist of ambiguity, who pottered around Hampstead in his dotage, and invited Bronco to his parties.
John Keats. Spent his tubercular twilight in his ‘Grove’, writing Ode To A Nightingale in the garden.
Joshua. Barefoot, skip-be-robed, lion-maned and prophet-bearded Messiah of the Millennium, who didn’t do surnames, spread Revolution and Evolution in equal measure, was a King of the Squatters, believed he was immortal, eclipsed the Equinoxes, and once tried to march on Downing Street.
Katherine Mansfield. Out-wrote Virginia Woolf in East Heath Rd. gelling savagely with Lawrence.
Kingsley Amis. Drunken Literatus of the Flask Pub, who staggered past me once in a state of hopeless inebriation in Flask Walk, never foregoing such pleasures purely for the sake of spending a few extra years in an old people’s home in Weston-Supermare or making a sober appraisal of his son’s work.
Leigh Hunt. Lived in the Vale of Health in the 1810s, and was jailed for insulting the Prince Regent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Great mystic Viennese oddball criss-crossing Cambridge for an Infinitist map.
Michael Foot. Byron scholar, failed politician, dog-walker, and last of the left-wing Intellectuals.
M.P. Shiel. Fantastical Edwardian Author of Prince Zaleski and Xelusha; also The Purple Cloud, whose main protagonist, Arthur Jepson, briefly inhabits Hampstead like Mary Shelley’s Last Man.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Great straddler of the Divide between classical twilight and modern dawn.
Karl Marx. Great Revolutionary Apostle, re-thinking the old world anew, from Hegel to Highgate.
Peter Vansittart. Eminence grise of 20th. C English Letters, who housed deserving poor geniuses.
R.L. Stephenson. Lived in/on The Mount in the late 19th. C. splitting himself in Jekyll And Hyde.
Stanley Spencer. Once upped sticks from Cookham to the Vale of Health, in his pyjamas.
Samuel Johnson. Great ‘Egadder!’ of the Kit-Kat Club, conceiving ‘London’ in the fields and lanes.
S.T. Coleridge. Lived in Highgate Grove from 1816, tramping on the Heath regularly high on opium.
Ted Honderich. Post-Marxist philosopher. Still-living scourge of all establishments, once calling Roger Scruton a cunt.
Wilkie Collins. Lived in Church Row in the mid-19th. C. and created ‘The Woman In White’.
William Blake. Visionary visitor to Wylde’s Farm in the 1820’s, painted by John Linnell with a stick.
William Empson. Begoggled, grizzly-haired literary scholar and poet, and seven way anatomist of ambiguity, who pottered around Hampstead in his dotage, and invited Bronco to his parties.