by John Higgs
Sigmund Freud’s famous quote that ‘Dreams are the royal road to the subconscious’ comes from his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams. Luis Buñuel’s third-person comments are from his essay Notes on the making of Un Chien Andalou, which is included in the British Film Institute Blu-ray release of L’ge d’or. The description of Dalí and Buñuel’s dreams comes from Robert Short’s essay Un Chien Andalou and L’ge d’or in the same release. Buñuel’s quote ‘There’s the film, let’s go and make it’ is from Meredith Etherington-Smith’s biography of Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (p. 94). The review of L’ge d’or in Le Figaro is from the 7 December 1930 issue. The details about the amount of fabric used in contemporary dresses comes from Bill Bryson’s One Summer. The quote from Dorothy Dunbar Bromley is found in Joshua Zeitz’s Flapper.
The quote from the Marquis de Sade is taken from Elaine Sciolino’s 22 January 2013 New York Times article, ‘It’s a Sadistic Story, and France Wants It’ (p. C1). Details of Dalí’s sexuality can be found in Clifford Thurlow’s Sex, Surrealism, Dalí and Me. His quote about impotence is found in Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. The praise from Freud appears in the foreword of Dalí’s own autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. Henry Miller’s description of Dalí is from an autograph which can be seen at http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/dali-is-the-biggest-prick-of-the-20th-century.html.
The number given for Jews killed in the Second World War is from Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War against the Jews. The detail about Hitler’s portrait of Henry Ford is from p. 296 of Antony Beevor’s The Second World War.
6 UNCERTAINTY: THE CAT IS BOTH ALIVE AND DEAD
Bertrand Russell’s letter to his friend Helen Thomas is quoted on p. 179 of William R. Everdell’s book The First Moderns. Einstein’s quote about the ground being pulled out from underneath is found in Paul Arthur Schilpp’s Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Volume II. The quote from Richard Feynman is from The Character of Physical Law, a Cornell University lecture he gave in 1964, and the Douglas Adams reference is from Mostly Harmless. Einstein’s quote that ‘God doesn’t play dice’ can be found in many sources, for example p. 58 of William Hermanns’s Einstein and the Poet. Stephen Hawking’s essay Does God Play Dice? can be found on his website at http://www.hawking.org.uk/does-god-play-dice.html.
The quote ‘a shlosh or two of sherry’ is from Peter Byrne’s December 2007 Scientific American article, ‘The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett’. The quote from Léon Rosenfeld comes from a 2008 paper The Origins of the Everettian Heresy, by Stefano Osnaghi, Fabio Freitas and Freire Olival Jr, which is online at http://stefano.osnaghi.free.fr/Everett.pdf. The quote from David Deutsch is from his book The Fabric of Reality. The analogy about the size of atoms is from Marcus Chown’s Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You.
7 SCIENCE FICTION: A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY
The quotes from Alejandro Jodorowsky are from the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, by Frank Pavich. The quote from Ken Campbell is as recounted to the author by Campbell’s daughter Daisy Eris Campbell. The words of J.G. Ballard are taken from Alan Moore’s essay ‘Frankenstein’s Cadillac’, Dodgem Logic #4 June/July 2010, as are Moore’s comments about Tom Swift. The quote from Carl Jung about UFOs is from his 1959 book Flying Saucers.
Gene Roddenberry’s words are from The Birth of a Timeless Legacy, on the Star Trek Series One DVD (CBS DVD PHE 1021). The quote from Eric Hobsbawm is from p. 288 of Fractured Times. The account of the origins of cinema is based on Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was directed by Enoch Rector in 1897. The quote from Joseph Campbell is taken from the Introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Philip Sandifer’s analysis of The Hero’s Journey is on his website, at http://www.philipsandifer.com/2011/12/pop-between-realities-home-in-time-for.html.
8 NIHILISM: I STICK MY NECK OUT FOR NOBODY
The quote from screenwriter Æneas MacKenzie comes from the commentary by historian Rudy Behlmer on the Blu-ray release of Casablanca (BDY79791). The three quoted lines from Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book are from p. 47, p. 56 and pp. 29–30 respectively. Waiting for Godot was voted the most significant English-language play by a British National Theatre poll of 800 playwrights in 1999. Beckett originally wrote the play in French, but was eligible in this poll because he did the English-language translation himself. Vivian Mercier’s review of that play was in the Irish Times on 18 February 1956.
The quote from Albert Camus is from his 1952 essay Return to Tipasa. Colin Wilson’s criticism of Endgame is taken from his 2009 book Super Consciousness. The quote from William Blake comes from The Mental Traveller, circa 1803. The origins of the term ‘Beat Generation’ are detailed in Brewer’s Famous Quotations by Nigel Rees. Gregory Corso’s remarks are from the 1986 film What Happened to Kerouac? by directors Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams.
9 SPACE: WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
William Bainbridge’s comment is found in George Pendle’s Strange Angel (p. 15), and p. 14 of that book is the source for the quote from a 1931 textbook, Astronomy by Forest Ray Moulton (p. 296). John Carter’s description of Jack Parsons’s impact on the field of solid-fuel rocketry comes from p. 195 of his book Sex and Rockets. That book is also the source for the quote from Dr John Stewart (p. 47), the rumour about the sex tape with his mother’s dog (p. 183), the descriptions of his advert for prospective tenants (p. 103) and his occult ceremonies (p. 84).
The detail about Nazi rocket scientists reaching a height of sixty miles comes from Deborah Cadbury’s Space Race (p. 11). Parsons’s poem ‘Oriflamme’ is quoted on p. 218 of George Pendle’s Strange Angel. The quote from Crowley about Parsons and Hubbard comes from John Carter’s Sex and Rockets (p. 150), and Hubbard’s warning is from p. 177 of the same book.
Hitler’s reaction to the A-4 rocket is described in Deborah Cadbury’s Space Race (p. 5). Bob Holman describes his childhood memories of a V-2 bomb in his 8 September 2014 article in the Guardian, ‘I saw the devastation of war 70 years ago. It was not glorious.’ Von Braun’s involvement in acquiring slave labour from Buchenwald is detailed in Deborah Cadbury’s Space Race (p. 343). Estimates for the number of casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are taken from the Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp10.asp. The quote from Eisenhower comes from his autobiography The White House Years (pp. 312–3). Von Neumann’s use of game theory to argue for an unprovoked nuclear strike on Russia is discussed in chapter twelve of Paul Strathern’s Dr Strangelove’s Game.
Sergei Korolev’s story is told in Deborah Cadbury’s Space Race, including the account of his witnessing a butterfly (p. 87), and the same book recounts NASA’s reaction to news of Yuri Gagarin’s successful flight (p. 246). Von Braun presented three episodes of the TV series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour: Man in Space (1955), Man and the Moon (1955) and Mars and Beyond (1957). A complete transcription of President Kennedy’s speech to Congress can be found at http://www.jfklink.com/speeches/jfk/publicpapers/1961/jfk205_61.html.
10 SEX: NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE (WHICH WAS RATHER LATE FOR ME)
Details of the life of Marie Stopes are from Ruth Hall’s biography, Marie Stopes, with her mother’s argument in favour of direct action taken from p. 54 and her father’s letter quoted on p. 21. Stopes claimed to be ignorant of homosexuality and masturbation until the age of twenty-nine on p. 41 of her book Sex and the Young.
The source for the average size of families in 1911 and 2011 is the Office for National Statistics. The quote from the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops is from the 1920 Lambeth Conference Report, Resolution 70. The words of Archbishop Hayes appeared in the 18 December 1921 issue of the New York Times, and were quoted on p. 162 of Ruth Hall’s Marie Stopes. The letter from an unnamed railway worker is quoted on p. 257 of Hall’s book.
Senator Smoot’s words are from ‘National Affairs: Decency Squabble’ in the 31 March 1930 issue of
Time magazine. The quote from Marie Stopes’s trial is from p. 216 of Ruth Hall’s biography. The Doctor Who story mentioned was Doctor Who: The Romans, broadcast on BBC1 in January 1965. The song ‘Rape’ appears on Peter Wyngarde’s self-titled album, released by RCA Victor in 1970. Betty Friedan’s quote regarding sexual liberation being a misnomer is from her September 1992 interview with Playboy magazine.
11 TEENAGERS: WOP-BOM-A-LOO-MOP-A-LOMP-BOM-BOM
‘Tutti Frutti’ was named number one in the Top 100 Records That Changed the World chart in the August 2007 edition of MOJO magazine. The quote from the 1956 Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook is taken from Ken Goffman and Dan Joy’s Counterculture through the Ages (p. 225). Details of the FBI’s investigation into ‘Louie Louie’, including the quote from LeRoy New, come from Alexis Petridis’s article in the 23 January 2014 issue of the Guardian, ‘ “Louie Louie”: The Ultimate Rock Rebel Anthem’. Details of the original lyrics of ‘Tutti Frutti’ come from Charles White’s The Life and Times of Little Richard. ‘The Wagon’ was a 1990 single by Dinosaur Jr, and opens their album Green Mind.
The account of Keith Richards’s legal difficulties in Arkansas comes from his autobiography Life, as does his quote about The Beatles aiming ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ at his band (p. 158) and his statement that ‘We needed to do what we wanted to do’ (p. 123). The William Rees-Mogg editorial appeared in the 1 July 1967 issue of The Times. Paul McCartney sang about the love you take and the love you make in ‘The End’, from the Abbey Road album. The speeches from Margaret Thatcher are archived at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.
Remarks about a neurological difference between pre-pubescent and adolescent brains are based on Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Suparna Choudhury’s ‘Development of the Adolescent Brain: Implications for Executive Function and Social Cognition’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47:3/4 (2006), pp. 296–312. The argument that the counterculture fed the consumer culture it railed against is made by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. Kurt Cobain sang about how teenage angst had paid off well in ‘Serve The Servants’, the opening track on Nirvana’s 1993 album In Utero. Ken Goffman’s quote comes from Counterculture through the Ages (p. xvi)
12 CHAOS: A BUTTERFLY FLAPS ITS WINGS IN TOKYO
Von Neumann’s plans to control the weather are discussed in Paul Strathern’s Dr Strangelove’s Game (p. 303). Owen Paterson’s worrying understanding of climate change was widely reported, for example in Rajeev Syal’s 30 September 2013 article in the Guardian, ‘Global warming can have a positive side, says Owen Paterson’.
Accounts of the work of Lorenz and Mandelbrot are based on James Gleick’s Chaos. Lorenz’s seminal paper ‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow’ was published in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (1963). The quote from Mother Teresa is taken from chapter one of James Lovelock’s book The Revenge of Gaia. Carl Sagan’s quote is from his book Pale Blue Dot (pp. xv–xvi). The quote from Alan Bean comes from the official website for his artwork (http://www.astronautcentral.com/BEAN/LTD/WayWayUp.html). The observation that the position of the astronaut on the journey home correlates to how spiritually affected they were was made by Andrew Smith in his book Moon Dust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth.
13 GROWTH: TODAY’S INVESTOR DOES NOT PROFIT FROM YESTERDAY’S GROWTH
For an overview of the change in extinction levels in the twentieth century, including the estimate that puts them at between 100 and 1,000 times the background rate, see Howard Falcon-Lang’s 11 May 2011 BBC article, ‘Anthropocene: Have humans created a new geological age?’ at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13335683. The figure for the Gross World Product is based on the value of the US dollar in 1990, and is from J. Bradford DeLong’s 1998 study Estimating World GDP 1 Million BC – Present. Figures for global energy consumption are taken from the 16 February 2012 article ‘World Energy Consumption – Beyond 500 Exajoules’, which is online at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8936.
The statistics about the number of corporations using the Fourteenth Amendment are taken from the 2003 documentary The Corporation, directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. For a comparison of the economic size of nations compared to corporations, see the 4 December 2000 paper by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies, ‘Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power.’ The US Justice Department’s inability to prosecute HSBC was widely reported, see for example Matt Taibbi’s article ‘Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail,’ Rolling Stone, 14 February 2013. For a short overview of the Bhopal disaster, see Tony Law’s 3 December 2008 article for Wired, ‘Bhopal, “Worst Industrial Accident in History” ’. For an account of the legal action by Nestlé against War On Want, see ‘The Formula Flap,’ TIME magazine, 12 July 1976.
Life expectancy figures are from Kevin G. Kinsella’s ‘Changes in Life Expectancy 1900–1990,’ for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1992). For an account of the prospects of the millennial generation, see Elliot Blair Smith’s 21 December 2012 Bloomberg report, ‘American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals’. For an account of falls in life expectancy, see Sabrina Tavernise, ‘Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.’, New York Times, 20 September 2012.
The fact that the combined wealth of the eighty richest people is the same as the combined wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion is from Oxfam’s report Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More, which can be found online at http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/ib-wealth-having-all-wanting-more-190115-en.pdf. For figures about the size of the derivatives market, see ‘Clear and Present Danger’, the Economist, 12 April 2012. The quote from Warren Buffett comes from his Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report, 2002. For the link between oil prices and GDP, see Rebeca Jiménez-Rodriguez and Marcelo Sánchez, Oil Price Shocks and Real GDP Growth: Empirical Evidence for Some OECD Countries, European Central Bank 2004. For more on the ownership of Bolivian water, see Jim Shultz, ‘The Politics of Water in Bolivia’, The Nation, 14 February 2005.
For an example of follow-up studies to Limits to Growth, see C. Hall and J. Day, ‘Revisiting the Limits to Growth after Peak Oil,’ American Scientist, 2009 or Graham Turner, Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Historical Data, University of Melbourne, August 2014. For details of a study that argues inequality makes environmental problems worse, see Nafeez Ahmed’s 14 March 2014 article in the Guardian, ‘NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for “irreversible collapse”?’. Margaret Thatcher’s 1989 address to the UN General Assembly can be found at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817.
14 POSTMODERNISM: I HAPPEN TO HAVE MR MCLUHAN RIGHT HERE
Details about the origins of Mario are from David Sheff’s Game Over: Nintendo’s Battle to Dominate an Industry. IGN’s Best Game of All Time poll can be found at http://uk.top100.ign.com/2005/001-010.html.
The New York Times obituary ‘Jacques Derrida, Obtuse Theorist, Dies at 74’ was written by Jonathan Kandell and published on 10 October 2004. Richard Dawkins’s example of seemingly meaningless postmodern discourse is from ‘Postmodernism Disrobed’, Nature 394, 9 July 1998, where he is quoting the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The quote from Carl Jung comes from a personal letter he wrote to Peter Baynes on 12 August 1940. Neil Spencer’s comments about the lyrics to ‘Aquarius’ are from p. 124 of his book True as the Stars Above.
Richard Dawkins’s quote regarding cultural relativity is from ‘Richard Dawkins’ Christmas Card List’, the Guardian, 28 May 2007. Pope Benedict XVI’s quote is from ‘Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Participants in the Ecclesial Diocesan Convention of Rome’, 6 June 2005. The quote from Martin Luther King Jr is from ‘Rediscovering Lost Values’, a sermon delivered at Detroit’s Second Baptist Church, 28 February 1954. Roger Scruton’s quote is from p. 32 of his book Modern Philosophy.
15 N
ETWORK: A PLANET OF INDIVIDUALS
For a ‘morning after’ account of the non-impact of the Year 2000 Bug, see the BBC News story ‘Y2K Bug Fails to Bite’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/585013.stm). The Everyday Sexism Project is at everydaysexism.com. For an account of the consequences of putting a cat in a bin, see Patrick Barkham’s 19 October 2010 article ‘Cat Bin Woman Mary Bale Fined £250’, in the Guardian.
The quotes from Alex Pentland come from his 5 April 2014 New Scientist article, ‘The death of individuality’. The quote from Bruce Hood comes from his book The Self Illusion. For more on the amount of bacteria cells in a human body, see Melinda Wenner, ‘Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones’, in the 30 November 2007 issue of Scientific American.
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Beevor, Antony, The Second World War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012)