Talk:Stephen Potter

	University of Oxford portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject University of Oxford, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the University of Oxford on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.University of OxfordWikipedia:WikiProject University of OxfordTemplate:WikiProject University of OxfordUniversity of Oxford articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Biography: Arts and Entertainment

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the arts and entertainment work group (assessed as Mid-importance).

Henry Arthur Jones or James ?[edit]

A thorough but unattributed and undocumented chronology at Stephen Potter - Biography , my most fertile source, includes the entry

~~1923-1926 Secretary to Henry Arthur James, the playwright.~~

While i get no hits on

"Henry Arthur Jones " "stephen potter",

i also get none on

"Henry Arthur James" playwright OR theater OR theater OR drama

On the other hand,

"Henry Arthur Jones"

produces numerous theater-relevant hits, and suitable dates.

I conclude that the struck out material above is a slip of the eye or pen for

1923-1926 Secretary to Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright.

--Jerzy (t) 05:19, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

I made a couple of minor corrections, and an update 2005-05-11. My reference is Julian Potter, Stephen's younger son and biographer. From Pinctor

Jerzy's conjecture is correct. Alan Jenkins's biography of Potter confirms that SP. was secretary to Henry Arthur Jones (p.69), although the book is vague about exact dates of employment. Lexo (talk) 22:20, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No Stephen Fry[edit]

I removed the following sentence:

Audio versions, read by Stephen Fry, are available in the U.K.

Alas, there is no sign of such audiobooks anywhere. I suspect someone got confused because Stephen Fry did the Harry Potter audiobooks in the UK, thus leading to an obvious search engine confusion (Stephen + Fry + Stephen + Potter + audiobook). It would, of course, be lovely if Stephen Fry did do them -- they are close to his kind of satire. But they do not presently exist. Artemis-Arethusa 20:39, 17 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Upping the quality of this article[edit]

I own a copy of Alan Jenkins' biography of Potter, plus have a small collection of Potter's works (all of his gamesmanship/lifemanship stuff plus the anthology The Sense of Humour, the travel book Potter in America and his early study of D.H. Lawrence.) I am something of a fan but while I have no illusions that an article on Potter need be of the scale of an article on, say, Leo Tolstoy or Alan Turing, I do think that his influence has been out of all proportion to the number of people who've actually read his stuff. He has changed people who've never even heard his name, but who have heard of the concepts he (arguably) gave a name to. Also, I think that the sources demonstrate that Potter had a bizarre cult following in the post-WW2 US intelligence community. I will do my best to get this article to a higher level. Lexo (talk) 21:30, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That would be helpful. "Remember, if you are not one up, you are one down." --John Nagle (talk) 00:38, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Influence of Gamesmanship/One-upmanship[edit]

Eric Berne, the author of "Games People Play," gives Stephen Potter credit as one of the progenitors of Transactional Analysis. In this connection, it is not just the four "Up-manship" books (Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship and Supermanship) that merit consideration, but also the fifth of the series, "Anti-Woo," which did not make it into paperback. Unlike some of Berne's books, where the game players may be seeking intimacy, in Anti-Woo the prototypical English bachelor seeks to avoid being ensnared by predatory females: the "ploys" used can be viewed as the kind of ultmately self-defeating games that Berne described in his later works.NRPanikker (talk) 15:56, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Stephen Potter. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090907172010/http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1993/autumn/lowrey-timelessness/ to http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1993/autumn/lowrey-timelessness/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 16:44, 14 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]