John Symonds, who died on October 21 aged 92, was the prolific author of imaginative, quirky fantasies, though he was better known as the literary executor and biographer of the voluptuary, occultist and megalomaniac Aleister Crowley (1875-1947).Symonds met Crowley a year before his death, at a Hastings boarding house where the self-styled “Beast 666” was eking out his squalid final months as a spent mage on a diet of gin and heroin. Crowley’s will, which he apparently concocted himself, vested the copyright of his works in Symonds and made him his literary executor.Symonds was initially fascinated by Crowley, but as...