You've probably read it, be honest. William Blake said that if we could cleanse the "doors of perception" we would perceive "the infinite". Huxley thought mescalin was the way to do so. In this essay, he pops a pill, goes on about "not-self" and "suchness", and decides love is the ultimate truth. He also took LSD when dying, but hardly stuffed it down the way his fans did. Jim Morrison was one: O is a beautiful woman who submits to the sadistic whims of various men after she is kidnapped and taken to a chateau to be blindfolded, whipped, branded and pierced.
It ends with an odd sense of triumph, O wearing nothing but a mask before a group of strangers.
50 best cult books
Bewildering, creepy and joyless, it's a guaranteed detumescent. Modesty was not one of his virtues; nor, sadly, was literary ability. It is the result of seven years of road-trips across America during the s. Initially it celebrates the alternative lifestyle, although by the end it is coloured by disappointment. In November , A long-lost letter sent to Keroac from writer Neal Cassady was found after more than half a century.
After reading it Kerouac ripped up an early draft of On the Road and spent three weeks re-writing the novel to mimic its stream of consciousness style. The note - an page rambling stream of consciousness written by fellow writer Neal Cassady to his friend in - had been considered one of the greatest losses in literary history. An ineradicable elegy for a vanished society, and, despite its risorgimento setting, still the best psychological and botanical guidebook to parts of southern Italy.
Made it possible for the middle classes to embrace the Mediterranean. On February 3 , Harper announced that Go Set a Watchman, a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the Fifties and put aside, will be released July Rediscovered last autumn, Go Set a Watchman is essentially a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it was finished earlier.
The page book will be Lee's second, and the first new work in more than 50 years. Literary history would be entirely different if Heller had followed his original intention and called it Catch Through the conflict between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy, the novel explores the theme of how individuals are crushed and of rebellion against conformity. Unforgettable stuff, after which mazes and mirrors will never be the same again. Often beloved of the kind of person who agrees with its author that "there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition", and none the worse for that.
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The narrator is a talented writer who arrives in New York with every opportunity before her, but buckles. The Bell Jar became a rallying call for a better understanding of mental illness, creativity and the impact on women of stifling social conventions. Plath killed herself a month after its publication. The first in an increasingly soap-operatic sequence. Like most John Fowles, this is solid middlebrow dressed as highbrow, but stunning setdressing, TS Eliot quotations and a twist at the end guaranteed a lifelong place in the hearts of a certain type of bookish male.
Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper. Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? To a generation of readers it fostered a burning envy that they had not been in San Francisco when the Kool-Aid dispensers were being spiked with "Purple Haze". Now a vivid social history of a period that seems as remote as Byzantium. Like much of Vonnegut's stuff, this is savage anger barely masked by urbane anthropological sarcasm.
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- Monarchs of the Renaissance: The Lives and Reigns of 42 European Kings and Queens.
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Very much a defining cult novel. Later, he resigned for gross corruption, a fitting punishment for his dreadful taste. Greer told a generation of women that society had turned them into meek, self-hating, castrated clones. The book was an international best-seller which earned Greer a mixed but enduring legacy. Bad craziness as the Duke of Gonzo and his helpless attorney blaze a streak of pharmaceutical havoc across s California, all in demented bar-fight prose and fever-dream set-pieces.
Now also a core text for ex-public school drug bores, which tends to obscure the anarchic excellence of HST's journalistic talent.
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And lots of rockets. Genius, though long enough to lie unfinished.
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At the end, though, she goes back to her husband. John Updike called it the most "delicious erotic novel a woman everwrote" — but really, what on earth was all the fuss about? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. Either a classic work of literary snakes and ladders or a tiresomely recursive bit of postmodern sterility depending on your interlocutor. Italo Calvino was arguably better elsewhere.
Douglas Adams was so brilliant a visionary that even in the late s he was able to foresee a time when digital watches would look pretty silly. Channel 5 celebrates the queen of Christmas with an entire evening in her honour. First up is this documentary, looking at her annual Christmas tour. Luckily, ITV are rehashing those halcyon days with this enjoyable blow-by-blow account.
The comedian meets the most inappropriate Father Christmas in the world, investigates a pagan alternative and muses on the office party bunk-up as he explores a selection of alternative festive traditions. But with this beautiful tale, Pixar took graphics to a new level. The whole trilogy is on BBC One this week see below. Surely, then, taking on a few cliff climbs with outdoor supremo Bear Grylls should be a doddle?
The duo helicopter-drop onto bleak but beautiful Dartmoor, tackling terrain used in training by Royal Marine Commandos. Still, nerves abound as the ever-hearty Grylls sets up challenges that leave Southgate visibly shaking — running head first down a sheer drop, hauling himself across a rocky chasm, and plunging into a stagnant bog-like pool.
Along the way Grylls goes in for his usual bout of male bonding, chatting with Southgate about his work as they camp in freezing conditions. The highlights include a strong choir and a musical turn from the cast of Doctor Dolittle, while the Blue Peter Advent Crown gets a birthday makeover. More music-loving members of the public enter the singing booth to rework their favourite tracks with veteran producers. Three courses stand between our cooks and the crown: The likeable comedian Romesh Ranganathan is in the Canadian Arctic for this festive edition of his travelogue series.
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He puts his veganism to the test in a hunting expedition, gets to grips with Inuit traditions, and learns why communities restrict their alcohol intake. Critic Mark Kermode casts his razor-sharp eye over films aimed at the festive season. Kermode dissects the techniques used by film-makers to capture the Christmas spirit. Every bit as ingenious, witty and exuberant as Toy Story, if not more, this sequel should bring as much pleasure to parents as it does to children.
Who would have thought that the alternating pattern of two musical notes would haunt cinemagoers for decades to come? Be careful what you pray for. This gentle ecclesiastical romcom stars David Niven as Henry Brougham, a harried bishop obsessed with raising funds for a new cathedral. Lucy Worsley needs little excuse to dress in period costume and lurk near a historical reconstruction.
Following her excellent Suffragettes series, she now explores an event that had repercussions for the template of the traditional Western wedding day. But, as Worsley documents here, there was an uneasy early courtship, that featured charismatic parrots and bouts of diarrhoea, before love blossomed.
First performed as a response to the horrors of the First World War, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has since become an annual Christmas fixture on radio and television Channel 5 dips its toe into the telethon format with this three-hour beanfeast raising money for animal charities. Fleetwood Mac have surely had one of the most tumultuous stories in rock. Stephen Mulhern hosts this quirky panel show, which not only revolves around soap opera trivia but tests their stars on it.
The scene in which our heroes slide into an incinerator is tense, and Spanish Buzz Lightyear is comedy heaven.