In the media age, every guru needs a message: “Tune in, turn on and drop out” was Leary’s mantra for the 1960s hippy-dippy-psychedelic generation. A behavioural psychologist, he was fired from Harvard for researching LSD and other hallucinogens, and developed a career as the guru of the drug culture and alternative lifestyle. Leary’s neat hustle was to peddle a philosophy that gave credibility to the psychology of postmodernism. Whether he was courageous or crackpot is a matter of opinion — he was always high entertainment.

JAPANESE FOR TRAVELLERS
by Katie Kitamura
Hamish Hamilton, £15.99

Katamura, an American-Japanese woman, recognises in herself “a feeling of displaced recognition” when she revisits Japan. What she means is that Japan is not California, where she was born and lives, and that she is homesick for Japan as she contrasts its pop culture and postwar history with California. She should make up her mind: Kool-Aid Kid or Kimono Kid. On a rail journey through Japan, she meditates on the landscape, visits the folks back “home”, and journalises her vacation. A cool cover pic of Katamura, reflective but posed, sums up her style.

REBEL QUEEN
by Jane Robins
Simon and Schuster, £20

Caroline of Brunswick, poor sacrificial cow, was chosen as the wife of decadent George IV by his mistress, Lady Jersey, to become Princess of Wales precisely because of her “indelicate manners . . . and not very inviting appearance”. When George cast her off, Caroline lit out for Europe where she indulged her large and lusty appetites for carnal pleasures. Shocked, George demanded her trial for adultery, whereupon she found herself taken up as an instrument of the revolutionary radical cause in England. Robins’s biography treats the pressure of public opinion in the context of Caroline’s trial as relevant to royalty today.

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