The London Shadow That Shaped 'Sympathy for the Devil'

The most direct inspiration wasn’t a single London event but a novel: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which Jagger had been reading. That book’s devil is a witty, worldly figure who shows up in 1930s Moscow and wreaks moral chaos. Jagger wanted to steal that voice—let evil speak in first-person, seductively, through history.

But the song also sucked up the specific unease of London