“... When​ you look at it, it looks like any other piece of land. The sun shines on it like on any other part of the earth. And it’s as though nothing had particularly changed in it. Like everything was the way it was thirty years ago.’ This is the first description of the Zone, the enigmatic and forbidden locus of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic (1972), filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker (1979 ...”

“... On​ the remote island of Siberut off the west coast of Sumatra, the Mentawai have a well-documented tradition of shamans: individuals known as sikerei heal people by communing with spirits. Manvir Singh, in the middle of his doctoral research in human evolutionary biology, went there in 2014 to undertake fieldwork. Sikerei were easy to spot, with their long hair, loincloths, strings of beads and spidery tattoos, which traced patterns and broken lines up their spines, limbs and torsos and across their faces ...”

“... Before dawn​ on 21 February 1803, the day of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard’s execution, London’s entire armed forces were on full alert. Every member of the Bow Street, Queen Street and Hatton Garden militias, along with numerous petty constables from the outlying boroughs, was placed on duty in ‘all the public houses and other places of resort for the disaffected ...”

“... In October​ 2013 a Time magazine article entitled ‘Syria’s Breaking Bad’ alerted Western media to the prevalence across the region of a little-known stimulant drug, Captagon. Lebanese police had found five million locally produced tablets, embossed with a roughly stamped yin-yang symbol, sealed inside a Syrian-made water heater in transit to Dubai ...”

“... In Britain​, the man who closed the asylums was Enoch Powell. ‘There they stand,’ he announced to two thousand delegates at the 1961 annual conference of the National Association for Mental Health (now known as Mind), ‘isolated, majestic, imperious … the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day ...”

“... Wouldn’t you like​ to see a positive LSD story on the news?’ asked the late comedian Bill Hicks in one of his most famous routines. ‘Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves ...”

“... Scarcely​ one year has gone by, and everything has taken on a new countenance.’ Early in the French Revolution, in 1790, Philippe Pinel observed the ‘salutary effects of the progress of liberty’ everywhere he looked. During the Ancien Régime he had seen Paris as an incubator for madness; now he recognised the epidemic of nervous illnesses that had plagued it as symptoms of a ‘social order ready to expire ...”

“... It​ was during the fallout from Watergate that the American public first heard of MK-Ultra, the most notorious of the secret mind control programmes that the CIA ran through the 1950s and 1960s. After Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up ...”

“... substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety of perspectives,’ Mike Jay writes in his new history, Mescaline. Its use in the Americas dates back thousands of years. It was the first psychedelic analysed by Western scientists, and in the early decades of the 20th century the only substance of its kind available to ...”

“... it’ (Coleridge had wanted the commission himself, but would probably never have completed it). Mike Jay’s new book on Beddoes is fascinating, exciting, entertaining, where Stock’s is dull, dull, dull. And yet the more I enjoyed it, the more I began to revise my opinion of what Stock achieved, though perhaps not to the point where I will feel ...”

“... in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz. ‘Mike’ from the San Fernando Valley was an incessant, soft-spoken maker of order and system, a godfather with no god other than success. No one was more prepared or implacable in negotiation. That closed smile was a lever with which to open a bottle, or a ...”

“... complaining that he’s such a ‘paragon of virtue’ that he scuttles Joe Klein’s book Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home – the ‘heroes’ are Eric and a few others, but mostly Eric. It’s not that the reviewer doubted Eric’s wonderfulness, just that he seemed a little dull: Consider Eric Greitens, a former Rhodes ...”

“... inheritance, and disinheritance. Try as he might, Carney can’t escape his past. His father, Mike, was shot by the police after breaking into a pharmacy ‘to steal a box of cough syrup, the strong stuff druggies were into’, and his notorious surname associates him with criminality in the neighbourhood. ‘When he was little, Carney and his father ...”

“... There’s a hopeful proposal to float a maypole down the Thames. Several people want an ‘open mike’, an impromptu ‘People’s Parliament’. About forty people attend the RTS meetings, the majority of them men. They include environmentalists, social justice campaigners, socialists and anarchists. There are three rather stiff rules: no smoking, no ...”

“... but only really for people who are too restless to read the book published in association with it. Mike Jay’s superb This Way Madness Lies (Thames & Hudson, £24.95) is as good a book on the subject as I’ve read – and I’ve read a few. Jay co-curated the exhibition, but it’s here, between stiff boards rather ...”