Allen writes widely on art and cultural history for visual art journals including Contemporary, Tate Etc, and Cabinet magazine, for which he guest-edited an issue dedicated to magic in 2007. He is a member of The Magic Circle, the UK organisation for professional magicians, and a curator at The Magic Circle Museum. In 2013 Allen identified a previously unknown tarot deck within the museum's collections hand-painted c.1906 by the English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare. He subsequently edited the first critical survey of Spare's cards.