While opium den is a term used by today’s interior decorators to describe any room with cushions on the floor, it wasn’t so long ago that it referred to a place where high and low society reclined and literally blew their minds away. Through brisk text and enthralling historical material Barbara Hodgson’s Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon takes the reader into the forbidden parlours where Thomas de Quincey, Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe saw their creative worlds expand, and where thousands of others turned into drug-addled ghosts. When opium was first introduced to the Western world, writes Hodgson, “it appealed to those with an artistic temperament in Europe and to degenerates in North America.” Hodgson’s lovely book is likely to appeal to the artist or degenerate in all of us.