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Born in Bristol, England, Paul Newman turned to full-time writing in the 1970s, since when he has published various titles on history, symbolism, literature and topography, notably The Hill of the Dragon (1979); Somerset Villages (1986); Bath (1986); Bristol (1987); The Meads of Love (1994); Lost Gods of Albion (1998); In Many Ways Frogs (poems with A R Lamb 1997) and A History of Terror (2000). Editor of Abraxas – a journal devoted to literature and ideas - his articles and stories have featured in Writers’ Monthly, 3^rd Stone, South West Arts, Westwords, Cornish Review, Psychopoetica, Ramraid Extraordinaire, Story Cellar and Dreams From A Stranger’s Café.

PRESS OPINIONS

The Hill of the Dragon (1979)

People who set out to write well-researched books on unexplained phenomena without an axe to grind deserve an award for heroism. Scientists and the incurious will snipe and lunatic fringe draw hysterical conclusions. So it must be particularly cheering to Paul Newman, author of a neat and witty book on dragons, to learn from the Blashford-Snell expedition that an 18-foot Saurian is still alive and well and eating people. Mr Newman’s book is great treat for the romantic zoologist, exploring the world-wide dragon myths with a thoroughness that would have delighted to late Willy Ley and Rupert Gould.

(Elizabeth Hogg – The Daily Telegraph)

Somerset Villages (1986)

In this delightful impressionistic guide, Paul Newman takes us through the many villages of Somerset, paying dues to the virtues of Cheddar Cheese, Taunton Cider and Hamstone. With a sharp eye and easy, evocative style, he opens our eyes to things we would otherwise overlook or ignore.

(The Countryman)

The Meads of Love (1994)

The biography, the first since the poet’s son wrote an idealised portrait following Harris’s death, is written with wit and style; it sets the homespun life against the great events of the time, and uses the poems to make intelligent guesses about Harris’s character.

(DM Thomas – The West Briton)

Lost Gods of Albion (1998)

The delight of this book is that it is a well-read and wry survey of the extraordinary variety of response and interpretation the hill-figures have evoked down the centuries.

(Richard Mabey – Daily Telegraph)

The greatest strength of this work is data, the objective information about situation, measurement and known history of each monument, presented fairly and with good humour and a superb garnish of evocative prose. The book is a useful corpus of fact and a fine example of the twentieth-century imagination at work.

(Ronald Hutton – Antiquity)

A History of Terror (2000)

Since human beings became aware of their own existence, people have been afraid. But have they always been afraid of the same things? Wild animals, spirits, demons and psychopaths: down the ages, the objects of our anxieties have changed and shifted. In this elegantly written, engagingly conversational and superbly informative book, Paul Newman charts the shapes and sizes our fear has taken, from the rustic ‘panic’ of ancient herdsmen suddenly confronted with the Great God of the wild, to postmodern websurfers, overwhelmed by the glut of useless facts on the ‘information superhighway’.

(Gary Lachman – Fortean Times)

Galahad (2004)

This novel throws light on the dark ages. We follow the adventure of wry, weary Galahad as he searches for the Grail, finds love, loses love, finds it again and meets a host of mythical characters. Holocaust scenes of appalling terror, including one featuring the Wicker Man, are contrasted with adventures of gentle hilarity and lyricism. Eventually Galahad grows tired and cynical. No longer does he want to fight knights or ogres or search for sacred baubles. No longer does he believe the world can be redeemed by a mystical object. He is deserted by his companion knight, Sir Hugh Meadmore, who is bloated by ale and personal vanity.  Yet defiantly he sticks with his quest and finds the Grail in the far north of Britain. He takes it back to Arthur who is already engaged in the last great battle of his career.

(Jacques Gobineau - The Dakota Review)

Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan (2004)

Few more nightmarish figures stalk through English Literature than Aleister Crowley (1975 - 1947), poet, magician and agent provocateur. In this groundbreaking study, Paul Newman dives into the occult mire of Crowley's works and fishes out gems and grotesqueries that are by turns sublime, ethereal, pornographic and horrifying. Like Oscar Wilde before him, Crowley stood in symbolic relationship to his age and to contemporaries like Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton and the Portuguese modernist, Fernando Pessoa. An influential exponent of the cul of the Great God Pan, his essentially 'pagan' outlook was shared by major European writers as well as English novelists like E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen.

Haunted Cornwall (2005)

For anyone wanting to know why Cornwall is called the most haunted place in Britain, this collection of sightings and happenings in streets, churches, public houses and country lanes provides the answer. From heart-stopping accounts of poltergeists to first-hand encounters with ghouls and spirits who haunt prehistoric graves, Haunted Cornwall contains a chilling range of ghostly phenomena. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, it features a dramatic ‘exorcism’ that took place at Botathan in the 17^th century; the spectre of Annie George at the First and Last Inn, Sennen; a ‘human double’ clocking in for work at a St Austell theatre school; a terrifying case of madness, magic and spirit possession at Tregerthen; a vanishing house at Bossiney; a phantom stagecoach on the Mevagissey road and the sirens singing at Tregudda Gorge near Padstow.

 The Tregerthen Horror (2005) - Available here for £12 + P&P 

Prior to the World War 2, West Cornwall generated a number of stories of a sinister occult nature. Foremost among them was that the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, stayed at Zennor and founded a mainly female cult who danced naked around stone circles, took powerful narcotics and held orgies up on the moor. This was spread by word of mouth and by numerous 'horror' fictions penned by writers like A.L. Rowse, Denys Val Baker, Mary Williams and Frank Baker (who wrote a bizarre roman à clef on the subject). Some maintained this decadent coven was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of Katherine Arnold Forster, the former sweetheart of the poet, Rupert Brooke, who died in mysterious circumstances at an allegedly 'haunted' cottage near Zennor Carn in 1938. In THE TREGERTHEN HORROR, these so-far unsubstantiated rumours are the subject of meticulous investigation by Paul Newman. Initially alerted by an anecdote (preserved in literature and living memory) of Crowley's influence tragically affecting the lives of a young couple who were living at Zennor, he starts out asking sceptically, "Why has no biographer ever taken this seriously?" But then he meets people who retain a living memory of the incident and is surprised to discover the association with Aleister Crowley and magical activities in Zennor date back to 1917 and the entourage of D.H. Lawrence which included the brilliant yet highly volatile musician, Philip Heseltine, and the babbling psychotherapist and ex-Crowley disciple, Meredith Starr, and his black wife, Lady Mary Stamford, both of whom fasted and undertook occult experiments in mines. Also present was the composer, Cecil Gray, who thought the region a 'spiritual black country'. Yet he managed to lure the poetess HD away from her husband and into the large house he rented there, resulting in the birth of a child, Perdita, who Gray quickly disowned. Both Gray and Heseltine later became involved with Crowley's drug-set and performed rituals to ensure the music they composed should attain the immortality they thought it deserved. THE TREGERTHEN HORROR traces their personal histories, their occult and spiritualist obsessions, in and out of Cornwall, along with those of another group who gathered around Mousehole prior to World War 2 - literary notables like Dylan Thomas, Oswell Blakeston, Frank Baker and artists like Greta Sequeira and the bohemian hostess, Wyn Henderson. Tracing their pre-war and post-war lives, it lays bare a series of fantastic incidents involving a society scandal, a haunted cottage, a tragic death, a chronic case of insanity, wartime skulduggery and the sensational Walton Murder that was investigated by Fabian of the Yard.  

Ancestral Voices Prophesying War (2008) £6.99 + £2 P&P

Other guests at Rempstone include Guy’s beautiful cousin, Daisy Bevan, with whom he has been having a long-standing affair and the ghost-writer, Algernon Blackwood, who portrayed the manor as a setting for his psychic detective story Nemesis of Fire. Daisy is the sister-in-law of the renowned “first lady of conspiracies”, Nesta Webster, who wrote books positing that Jews, Black Magicians, Bolsheviks and Masonic orders were working together to undermine civilization. There is also present, as a guest of the Bevans, the writer and spiritualist, Maud ffoulkes, whose ghosted autobiography of Countess Marie Larisch made a mark in modernist literature by way of its infiltration of The Waste Land.

For those interested in supernatural and literary history, Ancestral Voices Prophesying War is a key document, a fascinating experiment in crossing life-paths, coincidence and conspiracy. It is juxtaposed with an article on the poet, John Davidson, also drowned in Mount’s Bay, plus a compressed commentary on the ‘Tregerthen Horror’ and a study of the provenance of the Great God Pan.

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