Adventures in the Fourth Dimension
H.G.Wells’ Time Machine, the invention of cinema,
and a patent for travelling in the fourth dimension…

Enter the Jaguar
The temple ruins of Chavin in Peru, and the role of
hallucinogenic plants in the origins of Andean civilisation.

We Burn to Remember
Bonfire Night in Lewes: its riotous origins and survival against the odds.

James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom
The secret life and turbulent times of the first man to believe
that his mind was being controlled by a machine.

The Last Cargo Cult
On the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific, the worshippers
of the mysterious John Frum are still waiting for their promised
American cargo…or are they?

‘The Fruitful Matrix of Ghosts’
The psychic investigations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Mushrooms in Wonderland
Was Victorian fairy art and lore inspired by actual experiences
with mind-altering fungi?

The Sacred Stones of Borneo
When the Kelabit people of the Borneo highlands first came into contact
with the the modern world during World War 2, they were still erecting
megaliths in their elaborate funeral ceremonies.
Today, the sacred stones are being rediscovered…

Man of the Year Million
The evolution of H.G.Wells: the Darwinian terrors of
The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau
and The War of the Worlds.

Opium and the Symphonie Fantastique
The fever dreams of Hector Berlioz, and the role of opium in
the composition of his nightmare masterpiece.

The Art of Mind Control
The influencing machine in visionary and outsider art,
from James Tilly Matthews to the present.

The Rites of Roerich
How the artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich recreated the world of the
ancient Slavs for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – and then discovered
its surviving traces during his epic quest through the Himalayas.

Edward and Catherine Despard
Colonel Despard was branded a pirate and a revolutionary, a terrorist
and a traitor, and finally executed for high treason – but his accusers
were curiously reluctant to mention his mixed race marriage, perhaps
the first of its kind in British history.