Halfway through our conversation, Stewart Home does something unexpected. We are sitting at the kitchen table in his London flat, papers spread out, tea going cold, talking about fascism, conspiracy theories and the politics of the body. To underline a point about lived practice, Home pushes his chair back, places his hands on the floor and, with practised ease, lifts himself into a perfectly vertical headstand.

He holds it calmly, legs straight, balance unshakeable. Then he comes down, matter-of-factly, and resumes the discussion.

It is a small but telling moment. Home, the author of Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness, is not an armchair polemicist lobbing grenades at a practice he does not understand. He is, by his own admission, adept at yoga. His critique does not come from contempt for the discipline, but from a long engagement with how bodies, belief systems, and power interact.

“This isn’t about attacking yoga,” he tells me. “It’s about asking what’s been done with it.”

That question lies at the heart of Fascist Yoga, a book that has provoked fascination and discomfort in equal measure since its publication. Across Europe and the United States, from Die Welt in Germany to El País in Spain, from The New York Review of Books to The Observer and The Telegraph in the...

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