This book, the first published anthology of British surrealist poetry, takes its title from Herbert Read’s words when he opened the Surrealist Poems and Objects exhibition at the London Gallery at midnight on 24 November 1937. Within a few years the Second World War would effectively fragment the British surrealist movement, dispersing its key members and leaving the surrealist flame flickering only in isolated moments and places. Yet British surrealist writing was vibrant and, at its best, durable, and now takes its place in the wider European context of literary surrealism.

On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight includes work by Emmy Bridgwater, Jacques B. Brunius, Ithell Colquhoun, Hugh Sykes Davies, Toni del Renzio, Anthony Earnshaw, David Gascoyne, Humphrey Jennings, Sheila Legge, Len Lye, Conroy Maddox, Reuben Mednikoff, George Melly, E.L.T. Mesens, Desmond Morris, Grace Pailthorpe, Roland Penrose, Edith Rimmington, Roger Roughton, Simon Watson Taylor and John W. Welson. Many of the poems are published here for the first time. The book also reproduces key manifestos produced by the British surrealists, and includes illuminating introductory essays, a detailed chronology, biographical notes on the writers, and a bibliography. Illustrated throughout with drawings by Bridgwater, Colquhoun, Earnshaw, Maddox, Morris, Rimmington and Welson, this anthology is a fascinating record of a neglected strand of British poetry from the 1930s to the 1980s. British surrealist writing is at last given a chance to voice its subversion.