Comics legend Alan Moore combines history and magic in new novel The Great When

"I suppose it was a big decision I made." This is how Alan Moore, the acclaimed English author, recounts the night of his 40th birthday, some 31-odd years ago, when, after "quite a few beers", he declared to everyone present that he would become a practising ceremonial magician. "I decided that I'd devote the rest of my life to something that may not even be real," he tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show. Now, he's a writer and a magician, and his latest novel, The Great When: A Long London Novel, explores magic in a secret London that exists parallel to our own, called Long London. A new world The first of a planned series, the title of Moore's latest work is a play on "The Great Wen", a denigrating nickname for England's capital, coined in the late 19th century by radical pamphleteer William Cobbett.