NOT LONG AGO I shared a table with Uri Geller. It was the Magic Circle’s annual gala dinner and the room was crammed with magicians, many of whom had bent a few spoons in their time.

One approached the guest of honour to request an autograph. “Uri, would you mind signing my spoon?” Geller obliged, but then came the twist. “Now can you bend it for me?” Ah! Bend thisspoon. This signed spoon right here, this instant. It was a moment of recognition, a moment for a knowing smile from magician to magician. “Of course not.”

But Uri never faltered. He took the spoon, stared hard at it, or perhaps at his own inverted image, then set it down with an apologetic sigh. “I’m sorry . . . my powers are weak today. I am tired.”

In that moment it became clear why this man, widely “denounced by fellow magicians” as Michael Mangan observes, should be the guest of the world’s most celebrated magic society. For Geller there is no “back stage”. Or, he is really magic, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

Either way, he is the kind of magician that people once set fire to.

Performing Dark Arts is primarily about the other kind. It is about how conjurers, jugglers and escamoteurs have worked for generations – suspended between what is real and what is not, by a supreme act of will and sheer concentration. Whether apparently killing pigeons with their minds, like Brandon, Henry VIII’s licensed juggler, or eliciting accurate answers to audience questions from fabulous creatures, like William Pinchbeck’s Pig of Knowledge, the performers on Mangan’s impressive bill excel at one effect in particular – escape. They cheat death time and again. Not just by emerging from locked boxes in the nick of time, but by escaping the categories that we might try to keep them in, and the violence that might ensue if they were to be proved genuine or caught in a lie.

As the author says, a magician “blurs the distinctions between effective magic and entertainment, makes magic into performance and performs magic in the process”.

If you want a book that reveals “the secrets of street magicians” you will be disappointed. If you want to learn about the one trick that all good conjurers have up their sleeve, the oldest in the book – here it is, rehearsed across the centuries. It is to make sure that whichever cup the audience looks under – mere chicanery or actual sorcery – the ball is not there. It is to “leave us balanced between two explanations”, where we can enjoy the possibility of phenomenal powers, without the genie escaping the bottle.

And here, in the end, is the rub. We do not want to know that there is no such thing as magic – a fact worth pondering. But neither do we want to know for certain that there is.

Perform the “dark arts” on a spotlit stage, in a way that allows us to hold them “betwixt jest and earnest”, and your name might go up in lights. If the magic persists when the lights go on, in a way that can only be real, you are far more likely to go up in smoke.

PERFORMING DARK ARTS: A Cultural History of Conjuring by Michael Mangan

Intellect Press, £19.95; 280pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.96 (inc p&p)

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