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“... re-educate ourselves. Certain themes in the life and work of Sigmund Freud, of the LSD prophet Timothy Leary, and of the more strident feminist authors, of whom Andrea Dworkin is undoubtedly one, give glimpses of the culs-de-sac into which many roads turn. Unsurprisingly, Freud comes off least badly, but the case made against him by E.M. Thornton is ...”

“... visions, does the deliberate deafness take hold?’ is the way a piece began that yoked together Timothy Leary, anti-Freud polemic and Andrea Dworkin. ‘Oliver Sacks is the Jules Verne of the neurological interface’ was the opening of another piece. Just as often, the most startling insights appeared as throwaways. ‘It’s a moot point as to ...”

“... in mind-control experiments in Gravity’s Rainbow stem from Pynchon’s having worked, with Timothy Leary, for the CIA, distributing LSD among the rebellious youth of California to incapacitate the enemy within? Almost certainly not. It’s a shame – and one of those things some people like to call ‘an irony’ – that Pynchon’s assiduous ...”

“... except your dinner guests’. ‘They’ve outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet,’ Timothy Leary once moaned, though, technically, grass is a fruit. The perfect student menu could go something like this: Really Wild Mushroom Sauté * * * Pot Pesto & Herb Pasta * * * Mad For It Moroccan Majoun The mushroom starter has cannabutter (made with ...”

“... which those to come could breathe. Kerouac, Genet, Burroughs and John Coltrane were there before Timothy Leary, Marcuse, Germaine Greer and the Beatles. I remember feeling wretched in the early Sixties that I had been born too late, the Beats had already happened, the parade, the great time had passed before I was old enough to join in: just as later ...”

“... more are in the New Age style or promoting New Age ideology. There are also essays by Proust and Timothy Leary and some Freudian texts. Between them, these dominate the list and are the most visible volumes of non-fiction in the windows of every bookseller. Newspapers carry only an occasional article on popular subjects such as a new comet or an old ...”

“... on to hallucinogens. (On the way to the Lowell/Hardwick apartment on Riverside Drive in 1961, with Timothy Leary in tow, Ginsberg’s partner Peter Orlovsky asked an entirely reasonable question: ‘Why are we giving psilocybin to Lowell?’ Ginsberg, according to his biographer, Miles, was in no doubt: ‘We hope to loosen him up, make him happier ...”

“... once had a suite; Kim Philby came to stay. Dizzying deals were sealed over handshakes in the bar. Timothy Leary stayed here with some Black Panthers during his Middle Eastern study tour of revolutionary movements. The late Marquess of Aberdeen, as he wrote in the Oldie recently, would stay at the St George and make whoring trips to Mme Janette’s, two ...”

“... York Times Magazine entitled ‘Our Other Man in Algiers’.Soon after the opening of the embassy Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD (‘turn on, tune in, drop out’), and his wife arrived in town. Leary had been sprung from a US prison by the Weather Underground, who’d been paid $25,000 (some say $50,000) by the ...”

“... and eccentrics were all to abound, from Donne and Sir Thomas Browne through to Rousseau and Timothy Leary. But so many of them were egomaniacs, self-hating, self-exiled, possessed by daemons. Montaigne, by contrast, taught that the soul should be at home with the self – neither beast nor angel, but human. ‘Our great duty’, he wrote, is ...”

“... shoved everything into the rucksack: UFOs and Yeats, Grace Slick and Maud Gonne, ley lines, Timothy Leary and R.D. Laing, as we struck camp and pitched it a few metres down the road the following evening. It didn’t matter that we were still in the same place: the point was to see it – and ourselves – differently, to change the people we were ...”

“... beyond the SF ghetto: Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless paid Gibson plagiaristic tribute, Timothy Leary now advises people to ‘activate, boot up, and change disks in their minds’. Science fiction, increasingly recognised as Post-Modernism’s ‘low art’ double, is in danger of becoming respectable. Frederic Jameson has even declared ...”

“... looked not at all the type. He claimed he’d been given the LSD by Arthur Koestler, who had known Timothy Leary. She thought he might have got it in Buenos Aires from a CIA collaborator with the dirty war. His play name had something to do with spreading grain, fighting Communism. An acid vision. He believed in some variety of neo-Fascist revolution ...”

“... by producing the image of a keyboard on or around which you can then work); futurologists, freaks, Timothy Leary and other state-of-the-art gurus (‘if our destiny as organisms is to become wetware symbiotes of our own tools’); virtual personalities, cyber-gloves, flight simulators and cybernetic cadavers (for teaching surgery); Rheingold has clambered ...”

“... and doing his own writing. There are wonderful descriptions of the famous and the infamous – Timothy Leary, Warhol, Ginsberg, Charles Laughton, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Thom Gunn, the Reagans, Leslie Caron, Nehru – but it’s their performance that’s gossiped about, not their morals. When he describes people it’s as if he’s making notes ...”