The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties

'A history that makes perfect sense when the sky is falling down.' - The Sunday Times

Beneath the psychedelic utopianism of the sixties lay a dark seam of apocalyptic thinking that seemed to rupture into violence and despair by 1969.

Literary and cultural historian James Riley descends into this underworld and traces the historical and conspiratorial threads connecting art, film, poetry, politics, murder and revolt. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Manson Family and Roman Polanski...