Word: koestler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Great Britain is that peculiar country in Europe," Arthur Koestler once wrote, "where people drive on the left side of the road, measure in inches and yards, and hang people by the neck until dead." Hanging has indeed been a peculiarly British institution. During the 18th century, while capital punishment was being restricted elsewhere, the number of capital offenses under England's criminal law, which was commonly known as the "bloody code," increased fivefold, to more than 220. They included everything from associating with gypsies to stealing turnips...
...followed the carefree boisterous spirit of the Regency. It may be that the early '70s will see a period of repressive reaction against the Dionysian tendencies of the young. There may also be a purely spontaneous swing back to discretion and suggestion. "Writers and film makers," predicts Arthur Koestler, "will discover again that pubic hair is less poetic than Gretchen's braids." It is possible, too, that a decline in the work ethic or a weakening of demand for material goods may disrupt the foundation of a hedonist civilization-the economy...
Books are the single largest classification in the catalogue; they include works by a predictable pantheon of authors-Buckminster Fuller, Carl Jung, John Cage, Arthur Koestler-and some not so predictable. Particularly recommended are Cosmic View, a 1957 children's book by Dutch Schoolmaster Kees Boeke ("You advance in and out through the universe," says the blurb, "changing scale by a factor of ten") and Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Euell Gibbons' foraging guide to edible wild plants. There are "pop enlightenment" texts on yoga, sense relaxation, self-hypnosis and psycho-cybernetics. Among the catalogue's biggest sellers...
...give a truer picture of this world than sociologists, historians, scientists and politicians. "After all," he says, "who thinks of Queen Victoria in terms of Gladstone or the warehouse full of bureaucratic bilge? No. We think in terms of Dickens, as today will be thought of in terms of Koestler, Auden, Mailer and Waugh...
Love of Gab. Anthony Burgess is not merely a specialist with some painfully acquired, crotchety expertise in, say, lesser metaphysical lyrical poets. His intelligence functions at all levels on a list of subjects that includes Dickens, Kipling, Sartre, Greene, Waugh, Koestler, Milton, "The Writer As Drunk" (Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan), Shaw, Joyce, pornography and Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss...