The Fourth Colin Wilson Conference will be held this year at Wilson’s old London haunt, Soho, on July 7th, between 9:30am and 17:00pm. For the few remaining places please contact Colin Stanley at stan2727uk@aol.com. Papers include Gary Lachman on Colin Wilson’s ‘Double Brain’, Matthew Conlam on Wilson, his nemesis A. J. Ayer and “the Soul of British Philosophy”, David Moore on The Mind Parasites and other ‘mind viruses’, Lindsay Siviter on the notorious Dr. Crippen, David Power on how Existential Literary Criticism saved CW from Pierre Boulez (!), Anthony Peake on Wilson, J. B. Priestley and the enigmas of time-consciousness, Cathi Unsworth on Bella in the Wych Elm, and Darren Coffield on the legendary Soho drinking den The Colony Room. Finally Chris Nelson asks – as Wilson himself did – are we all multiple personalities?

To whet your appetite, here are some hand-picked Wilson quotes about the chosen subjects…

”The implications are clearly staggering. The person you call ‘you’ lives in the left side of your brain. And a few centimetres away there is another person, a completely independent identity” (from Frankenstein’s Castle, 1980, subtitled The Double Brain: Door to Wisdom).

”To my own slightly prejudiced eye, it often seems that he is at his best as a critic of other people’s ideas rather than as an originator” (Wilson on A. J. Ayer, 1968, reprinted in Collected Essays on Philosophers, 2016).

”I have occasionally been asked by the uninitiated whether I actually ‘saw’ them, or felt that they had a definite shape. The answer is no. My sensations can best be envisaged if you imagine how it feels when you are hot and tired, and everything seems to be going wrong” (from “that important document known as The Mind Parasites by Professor Gilbert Austin”).

”Crippen was certainly one of the most dangerous criminals of his century” (criminologist William Le Queux, quoted in Wilson and Pitman’s pioneering Encyclopaedia of Murder, 1961).

”The ‘modernists’ argue that all important artworks are ahead of their time, and that Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez will be one day as acceptable in the concert hall as Bach is today” (from Brandy of the Damned, 1964).

”To me, these considerations suggest that these two paradoxical concepts – time and the mind – are closely connected. Our bodies exist in the realm of one-way time, but our minds do not” (from ‘Time in Disarray’ in The Book of Time, 1980).

”In small, lonely communities, superstition itself can create a kind of ‘magical ether’ that may increase the effectiveness of the spells” (on the Lower Quinton ‘witchcraft murders’ from The Occult, 1971).

”Huysmans is right: alcohol has its own important role in the life of the mind, like poetry and music” (from A Book of Booze, 1974).

”It seems like this body of mine is not really ‘mine’ at all; it can be taken over by squatters. This is a flat contradiction of the materialist view – expounded in our time by Wittgenstein and Ryle – that ‘I’ am the sum of my bodily and mental states” (on multiple personalities, from Mysteries, 1978).