I’ve always loved magic. And the evidence is that most other people do too, even if they don’t necessarily think of it in that way. They have “magical” holidays and describe something that amazes them as “sheer magic”.
As a child, I loved making toys and other things out of twine, wool, elastic bands, wooden thread spools (for blowing bubbles), silver cigarette paper and a ball bearing (to make a kind of jumping bean), and of course paper of any kind, which could be folded into ships and planes, hats and beaks, and any number of other, more complicated shapes.
I read about Harry Houdini (real name Erik Weisz) in books that were careful not to divulge any of his real secrets. Houdini was a real all-rounder. He began as a trapeze artist, worked in vaudeville and even dressed up in an animal skin for a sideshow to become Projea, the Wild Man of Mexico. All before he got around to the escapes for which he became most famous.
He bettered conditions for magicians, and was voted president of the Society of American Magicians nine years in a row. He had a bee in his bonnet about spiritualism. He wrote a book debunking the 19th-century French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, from whom he had adapted his stage name. And he arranged with his wife that whoever died first would try, at a set time once a year for 10 years, to communicate from the other side and identify themselves through a secret code word.
Houdini’s magic was out of my league, so for a while about the age of nine or 10, I taught myself some magic out of a book. My first achievement was a “pick-a-card” trick, and, though it was crude, it worked every time. When any magician invites you to select a card, it’s either a “force” (in other words no real choice at all) or the choice doesn’t matter, because the card is going to be kept track of by some other means. In the trick I learned I took a peek at the bottom card after the final shuffle, and then exploited a visual angle so that my victims couldn’t spot my force.
Later, my little chest swelled with pride when I saw a proper magician perform a trick that I had already taught myself. It was another card trick, but not one for close-up performance. I had to make three oversized cards with symbols, a blue circle, a red square and a green triangle, none of them being what they appeared to be. The trick fools an audience twice, firstly when they think they’ve seen a cheat that’s not actually a cheat, and then they’re fooled again by the real trick, which is, of course a cheat.
Magicians themselves can be fooled. Houdini, who claimed he could work out how any trick was done after seeing it three times, fell victim in 1922 to a then unknown 27-year-old, Dai Vernon. He fooled the master with a routine that’s now known as Ambitious Card. That’s the one where a signed card mysteriously keeps rising to the top of the deck. Houdini watched it seven times before he conceded defeat.
Vernon, who lived until 1992, said Tony Slydini (real name Quintino Marucci, stage name a tribute to Houdini) was, “the only magician who could ever fool me”. Anyone ever wanting to understand how obvious and extreme and yet undetectable misdirection can be only has to check out the YouTube video of Slydini doing Paper Balls Over The Head on the Dick Cavett show.
I reconnected with doing magic about 10 years ago, as a way of keeping my mind off an Easter Rising centenary project I was editing, The Invisible Art, a book surveying the work of Irish composers from 1916 to 2016. Day after day I was able to delve into the world of magic in a way I never had been able to do before. And I was later able to deliver on the promise I made to myself that I would perform some of what I mastered in public, though in a musical context rather than a magical one. A little bit of trickery can set up a talk or presentation about music in a totally fresh way.
Yet, however much I enjoyed learning and doing the tricks, my older self enjoyed the wider insights even more.
The first thing to understand is that when magicians are talking they’re probably lying. And if they’re not, they soon will be. The patter is highly practised, and every word, hesitation or apparent stumble has probably been honed to guarantee the success of the trick. I knew that already. But it was only when I watched a 2013 Ted Talk by Apollo Robbins that I began to think of patter in an altogether different way.
Even Harry Houdini could be tricked. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Robbins is an ace pickpocket. “Known as ‘The Gentleman Thief’,” his website states, “Robbins first made national news as the man who pickpocketed the Secret Service while entertaining former US president Jimmy Carter. He has picked the pockets of more than 250,000 men and women. Forbes has called him ‘an artful manipulator of awareness’ and Wired Magazine has written that ‘he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked’.” Presumably he was only practising on some of the quarter of a million victims he lays claim to.
Robbins’s modelling of attention and distraction in magic made me realise that the talking is, in and of itself, actually an important element of misdirection. How so? Well, our instinct when somebody is talking is usually to listen. We want to know if they’re attention-worthy. But the attention that we give limits the amount of concentration we then have available.
Magicians talk about using perfectly normal card decks. But sometimes they are anything but normal, even when taken out of pristine wrapping. Magicians are skilled at prattling while doing any of the hundreds of impressive-looking, often mesmerising false shuffles. And that’s before you get around to techniques like pinky breaks and double lifts. It’s not just magicians’ card control that is magical, they also memorise complex sequences and patterns that most people would regard as impossible. In fact, one of the world’s leading card mechanics, Richard Turner, has been legally blind since childhood.
Quite how far magicians will go is not widely appreciated. Take Penn and Teller. The loud and garrulous Penn Jillette is 6ft 7in, his always silent partner, Teller, just 5ft 9in. Their style is gory, in your face. And they sometimes choose to tell you how a trick has been done. In fact, the duo were not admitted into the Magic Circle in the UK until 2025, because they breached the code of magicians not revealing their secrets.
Penn Jillette and Teller
In 1990, their Truck Trick has Teller lie on the ground while four of the wheels of a four-axle articulated truck drive over him. After which he just stands up and dusts himself off. The secret? The truck was counterbalanced with what Penn listed off as 6,000 pounds of stage weights, 8,000 pounds of wheel weights, and 3,000 pounds of concrete, all hidden from the outdoor audience and the camera by the truck itself. And the uninflated tyres were filled with foam rubber. Even if the weight could be an exaggeration (Penn is a magician, after all), the set-up is extreme.
Magicians weren’t always respectable people. It is Robert-Houdini who is credited with getting magicians off the streets and out of the fairs and into the theatre. He was also the first person to appear in the getup of top hat and tails, which then became customary for a long time.
[ When Harry Houdini performed in IrelandOpens in new window ]
Second Sight is the name of one of the great tricks he claims to have invented, and first presented to the public in 1846, though Houdini disputed his claim. The effect is as straightforward as you could wish. Robert-Houdin’s young son Émile, onstage and blindfolded, is able to identify the objects that his father is shown by members of the audience in the auditorium. Incredible! But only if you don’t know that the words and word order of everything Robert-Houdini said to his son was actually a code that included information about the relevant object.
The basic method of secret messaging became public news in 1986, when magician James Randi exposed faith-healer Peter Popoff by tuning in to the radio messages transmitted to Popoff by his wife, who had culled personal details of audience members and their ailments through the booking process. Like Houdini, Randi hated swindlers, con men, faith healers, mediums, frauds and psychics who used the techniques of magic to deceitfully part people from their hard-earned cash. Houdini was willing to pay people to expose spiritualists. Randi created the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate supernatural or paranormal activity under controlled circumstances. He never had to pay out.
The public, of course, can be very fickle. Randi’s celebrated debunking of Uri Geller, most famously on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show in 1973, seems to have had little impact on Geller’s career.
And it’s possible to make a case that 2026 represents a high-water mark in the exploitation of magic techniques. The simplest way of reading US president Donald Trump’s contradictory tirades is as the exploitation of magic techniques. His statements constitute a perfect example of misdirection. He sends his opponents into a spin as they try to grapple with everything he says, and then he says something else, often contradictory, to keep them in an always-on state of uncertainty.
He also exploits a technique called Magician’s Choice, a kind of manipulation in which what looks like a free choice always ends up with the magician’s preference. The subject always feels their choice to be free. And when anyone is taken step by step through a long string of choices they’re unlikely to see that the outcome was preordained.
The technique is not unique to Trump. People are always looking to make predetermined outcomes seem free in politics, industrial relations, advertising and personal relationships. Make up your own list.
I’ve strayed into mentalism, a subset of magic without visible props, where impossible outcomes appear to flow only from the words that are spoken. It is by some margin the most thoroughly deceptive of magical practices. Beyond its core techniques of deception, it can also venture into predictions based on human bias. Just google “grey elephant from Denmark”.
One of the strangest facts of magic is that magicians’ failures can add an allure of authenticity to what they’re doing. And magicians are well aware that failure is part of their lot. They counter it by having a range of outs, routes out of their tangle that don’t reveal what they were really up to.
What they’re always up to, of course, is deception. As Randi remarked: “No matter how smart or well educated you are, you can be deceived.” We’re all ready and wired to be duped. And not just by magicians.