In the 1970s, James Webb made a name for himself with his fascinating, if sceptical, histories of occultism, The Occult Underground (1974, first published in Britain as The Flight from Reason, 1971) and The Occult Establishment (1976). His most recent book, The Harmonious Circle (1980), a critical study of the enigmatic Russian ‘teacher’ Georges Gurdjieff, his disciple PD Ouspensky and their followers, had just been published and Webb’s career was looking good. He was a regular contributor to Encounter as well as to the encyclopædia Man, Myth and Magic, and his performance at Trinity College, Cambridge, was so stellar that a biennial James Webb Memorial Prize is awarded there in his honour.

Webb’s books combine a painstaking research into ‘the occult’ and an ironic dismissal of it, the kind of ‘know-it-all’ rationalism we’d associate with a Cambridge graduate.