I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary
With a foreword by Winona Ryder
Timothy Leary was one of the most controversial and divisive figures of the twentieth century. President Nixon called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ Hunter S. Thompson said that he was ‘not just wrong, but a treacherous creep and a horrible goddamn person.’ Yet the writer Terence McKenna claims that he ‘probably made more people happy than anyone else in history.’
A brilliant Harvard psychologist, Leary was sacked because of his research into LSD and other psychedelic drugs. He went on to become the global figurehead of the 1960s drug culture, coin the phrase ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’, and persuade millions of people to take drugs and explore alternative
lifestyles yet the tremendous impact of his ‘scandalous’ research has been so controversial that it has completely overshadowed the man himself and the details of his life. Few people realise that Timothy Leary’s life is one of the greatest untold adventure stories of the twentieth century.
Timothy Leary led a life of unflagging optimism and reckless devotion to freedom. It was, in the words of his goddaughter Winona Ryder, ‘not just epic grandeur but flat-out epic grandeur.’ Leary’s life is undoubtedly one of the greatest untold adventure stories of the twentieth century and this book presents it for the first time in all its uncensored glory.
Available from Amazon UK and all good bookshops
2000 TC: Standing on the verge of getting it on
This book was a limited edition of 111 copies, published to mark the performance of the band TC Lethbridge at the Cosmic Trigger play and festival in Liverpool, 22-23 November 2014. It is not currently available.
Iron Man Records talks about it here.
In August 2020 a second edition of 111 copies was made available. See here for more details.
William Blake Now
The visionary poet and painter William Blake is a constant presence throughout contemporary culture – from videogames to novels, from sporting events to political rallies and from horror films to designer fashion. Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the twenty-first century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.
A short, breezy book of 15,000 words, William Blake Now is available from Bookshop.org – which helps support independent bookshops and authors (affiliate link).
It is also available from Amazon | Waterstones | Hive.
An audiobook version, read by the author, is available from Audible.
The Brandy of the Damned
A novel.
Russell, Penny and Will have not seen each other for twenty years. Why, then, do they spend a month driving around the coast of Britain in a van refusing to listen to music? Why do they find little blue bottles washing up on the shore containing pages from a future Bible? And why is Penny carrying such a huge spade? Funny, surprising and good-hearted, The Brandy of the Damned is a dream-like short novel that leaves the reader strangely grounded and which reveals different things each time it is read. It is the literary equivalent of stepping off the path and heading out into the woods, knowing that if you can’t see what’s ahead you are never bored.
This book is no longer in print.
“An increasingly mesmerising hybrid of engaging travelogue and unsettling genre elements” – Jason Arnopp
“A child’s tale of the imagination told for adults, in a way that is both entertaining and beautiful” – CJ Stone
“A meta-magical fugue full of unexpected, almost accidental, profundity… it travels through a landscape where just about anything might happen while never compromising the readers’ belief in the reality of the characters” – Zenbullets
The First Church on the Moon
A novel.
Alcohol and life on the moon do not mix. It is the morning after the night before, and a number of problems face the staff of the Steve Moore Moonbase. The first lunar wedding was not a success. A visiting Bishop has a ridiculous obsession about how some “Americans” supposedly landed on the moon on 1969 CE. A phenomenal amount of energy is being used to broadcast an insult at the entire populations of Asia, Europe and Africa. And everyone on the moon is going to die. It is not, on the face of it, the best day for handling an unprecedented evolution in metaphysics.
But lunar hangovers are no different to their earth equivalents: no matter how bad things seem, you can always get through them. And everyone is welcome at the first church on the moon.
This book is no longer in print.
“A low-gravity romp through an alternative future, weirdly affecting, and strangely optimistic. As a science fiction satire on the absurdities of the human condition it bears comparison to the best of Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams. I can give it no higher praise than that.” – CJ Stone
Our Pet Queen
A short (15,000 word) eBook, commissioned by Random House Canada.
In the modern, democratic twenty-first century, the notion of an unelected, dynastic monarchy is not easy to defend.This new book argues that the current monarchy is by far the best system for choosing a Head of State – providing that it is understood that we are not subjects and that the monarchy are not our superiors. They are, in actual fact, our pets.
In this original eBook, John Higgs, author of the The 20th Century: An Alternative History, makes an argument in favour of the monarchy that will annoy royalists even more than it will annoy republicans. This is a tongue-in-cheek, witty examination of the persistence of monarchy in the modern world.