Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 26 of 26 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

... people who spoke of the world in specifically anti-rationalist terms. The talk was of Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Ouspensky, of bits and pieces of Jung, of the I Ching and the Tarot cards and of how psychotropic drugs, which we consumed in large quantities, might transform the mechanistic, aggressive world we had left behind into the peaceable ...

Hey, that’s me

Hal Foster: Bruce Mau, 5 April 2001

Life Style 
by Bruce Mau.
Phaidon, 626 pp., £39.95, November 2000, 0 7148 3827 6
Show More
Show More
... my relationship to this happy, smiling monster? Where is the freedom in this regime? Do I follow Timothy Leary and “tune in, turn on, drop out?” What actions can I commit that cannot be absorbed? Can I out-perform the system? Can I win?’ Is he kidding? Contemporary design is part of a greater revenge of capitalism on Post-Modernism – a recouping ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
Show More
Show More
... circle of friends and was, like Russell, a product of the hippie era. He had seen Nina Simone and Timothy Leary at the Fillmore East, and had run or attended rent parties all over New York, from Harlem to Staten Island. Mancuso’s sound designer Alex Rosner remembers an inspirational ‘mix of sexual orientation … a mix of races, mix of economic ...

The Passing Show

Ian Hacking, 2 January 1997

On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan 
Oxford, 188 pp., £16.99, September 1995, 0 19 823543 7Show More
Show More
... for example, absent fundamental physics or missed experience of the inside of a tornado. The late Timothy Leary, guru of LSD, is said to have exclaimed, after dropping acid, that Kant was right! There is a noumenal world out there, happily hinted at by perception-altering drugs. Kant, happily, survives such nonsense. Magee’s hypothesis is ...

How to be a wife

Colm Tóibín: The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy, 6 June 2002

Janet & Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 
by Jan Pottker.
St Martin’s, 381 pp., $24.95, October 2001, 0 312 26607 3
Show More
Mrs Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 297 64333 9
Show More
Show More
... Ben Bradlee. She introduced the President to the joys of marijuana and planned, with the help of Timothy Leary, to introduce him to LSD. Leary remembered her as ‘amused, arrogant, aristocratic’. She was added to the list of those who came regularly for intimate suppers with the President and his wife, just as ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
Show More
Show More
... Jack Nicholson, spread the word enthusiastically in magazine interviews, essays and movie scripts. Timothy Leary was turned on to LSD by maverick enthusiasts who acquired the drug directly from Sandoz, as Leary himself did for his experiments at Harvard.What seems remarkable today is not how much influence MK-Ultra ...

Who gets to trip?

Mike Jay: Psychedelics, 27 September 2018

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics 
by Michael Pollan.
Allen Lane, 465 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 0 241 29422 2
Show More
Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds 
by Lauren Slater.
Little, Brown, 400 pp., £20, February 2018, 978 0 316 37064 6
Show More
Show More
... surrounding these new drugs gave way to moral panic.’ ‘Researchers watched in dismay’ as Timothy Leary and his ‘antics’ ‘ignited what would become a public bonfire of all their hard-won knowledge and experience’. By the 1970s psychedelics had been ‘outlawed and forced underground’; only over the last few years has cultural and ...

True Bromance

Philip Clark: Ravi Shankar’s Ragas, 15 July 2021

Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar 
by Oliver Craske.
Faber, 672 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 35086 5
Show More
Show More
... had been persuaded to provide music for The Psychedelic Experience, a short film introduced by Timothy Leary which followed a man on a mescaline trip. Later Shankar felt deeply embarrassed by his involvement, and claimed he hadn’t realised that the film would be used to promote drug use. He was sympathetic to the general spirit of revolt of the time ...

Kick over the Scenery

Stephanie Burt: Philip K. Dick, 3 July 2008

Four Novels of the 1960s: ‘The Man in the High Castle’, ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, ‘Ubik’ 
by Philip K. Dick.
Library of America, 830 pp., $35, May 2008, 978 1 59853 009 4
Show More
Five Novels of the 1960s and 1970s: ‘Martian Time-Slip’, ‘Dr Bloodmoney’, ‘Now Wait for Last Year’, ‘Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’ 
by Philip K. Dick.
Library of America, 1128 pp., $40, August 2008, 978 1 59853 025 4
Show More
Show More
... composed The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) while on LSD. By 1968, he was in touch with Timothy Leary, and in trouble for non-payment of taxes. By 1972 he was a wreck, preoccupied with conspiracies and nearly unable to write: after giving the keynote address (‘The Android and the Human’) at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, he ...

Dephlogisticated

John Barrell: Dr Beddoes, 19 November 2009

The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius 
by Mike Jay.
Yale, 294 pp., £20, April 2009, 978 0 300 12439 2
Show More
Show More
... institute was not the power to transform human nature but a recreational drug – and there was no Timothy Leary on hand to say they were the same thing. Though Davy soon saw the possible use of nitrous oxide in ‘surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place’, this, like the word ‘anaesthetic’ itself, would not be developed ...

Was Ma Hump to blame?

John Sutherland: Aldous Huxley, 11 July 2002

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 496 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 316 85492 1
Show More
The Cat's Meow 
directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
April 2002
Show More
Show More
... to achieve enduring fame is The Doors of Perception, which has won its author a place alongside Timothy Leary in the pantheon of Class-A substance evangelism. As Murray and other biographers stress, Huxley’s experiments with mescalin, under the influence of which he was vouchsafed a vision of the chairness of chairs, were timid. They resemble nothing ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences