“... of southern Mexico in 1955. R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president of J.P. Morgan and amateur mushroom hunter, was convinced that hallucinogenic mushrooms had been used in the sacrament of an ancient and long-suppressed pre-Christian global religion. On the trail of a Mazatec tradition that reportedly survived in the mountain villages of Oaxaca, he sought out a ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... House’s ‘Special’ The Falkland Islands Dispute – International Dimensions Professor James Fawcett agrees on line 3 that ‘the determination of territorial title, when it is disputed, is a complex issue of fact and law,’ and asserts on line 31 that ‘the territorial title to the islands... must be accorded to the United Kingdom.’ On this ...”

“... on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes ...”

“... or not this bit of gossip is true, that ending would have fitted the epic sweep of the movie. But James Harvey found the happy ending a relief: ‘Sensible people don’t kill or maim each other for revenge or honour or empty matters of pride.’† And for Pippin the happy ending fits because the film was not really an epic to begin with: Dunson’s cattle ...”

“... Not really, Edwards thinks. Can the journal be described, as the historian James Clifford argued in a famous essay in 1981, as ‘ethnographic surrealism’? Hardly. Was Leiris really in pursuit of the exotic ‘black Edens’ he had glimpsed with the arrival of jazz in Paris after World War One? Pretty much: they led him to Africa in ...”

“... to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its horrible secret in the process: it ...”

“... to succeed in the small and still male-dominated enclave of SF, the talented woman who writes as James Tiptree Jr was obliged to keep her femininity a close secret.) In the 20th century, genre, or ‘category’, fiction has often enforced pseudonymy for the commercial reason that the author’s name must chime harmoniously with the product. Thus, in the ...”

“... Banting shared his portion of the prize with Best; Macleod shared his portion with the biochemist James Collip, who had helped purify insulin.That was the conventional account. But in the late 1960s, when Bliss was a graduate student in history, his older brother, a professor of physiology at McGill, had written to him with some gossip still going round ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... colour co-ordinated with the favours of the London Overground, had been made for a French hunter who wanted to stand out when the bullets were flying in some seasonal avian cull. Aylward was a veteran of pilgrim routes. He had completed the Camino de Santiago from St Jean Pied-de-Port, the full voie lactée, with a final push to Finisterre. (He wanted ...”

“... Mazzucato of University College London, and business gurus like Paul Hawken (co-author, with Hunter and Amory Lovins, of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, published in 1999). The green-growthers’ pitch is an appeal to the magic of innovation and technology. Self-described ‘techno-optimists’, such as the Financial Times ...”

“... Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding the waves of this ...”

“... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...”

“... memories of the Wild Hunt, as Falstaff – visibly transfigured by the buck’s horns of Herne the Hunter – is tormented by Mistress Quickly’s Fairy Queen and Pistol’s Hobgoblin. The forest is always liable to appear as the unsettled and unsettling opposite of the urban world, a threatening other whose status as res nullius sets it against the ...”