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“... husband. She became, once again, a Belfast girl, and her talk was no longer of Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley, but of Mrs Conroy’s operation. Like to like. In later years my father’s veneer wore thinner and thinner. His terrible failures undermined his pretences: he never finished his doctorate, he never wrote his book. He never found anyone to ...”

“... Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ... diamond rings on every finger proclaim the parvenu.’ An admirer should begin by acknowledging the force of the case against Poe. Those who ...”

“... from Reformation to Enlightenment which he sets out to encompass. To the question raised by Aldous Huxley in ‘Death and the Baroque’, of why funerary art became so obsessed with the representation of physical decay, he suggests no direct answer, although his analysis of the theory of the ‘two bodies’ the physical and the social, which ...”

“... was coined in 1953, by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (in correspondence with Aldous Huxley), in part to describe the experience of taking mescaline. The full spectrum of its effects includes ‘dizziness, fullness in the head, nausea, time distortion, a rainbow sheen of visual trails, hyperventilation, an uncanny sense of double ...”

“... by the prospect of genetic determinism and all its implications. Just over half a century ago, Aldous Huxley introduced us to a Brave New World: On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, and another rack-full was emerging. Machinery firmly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told ...”

“... woman whose life everyone wants to interfere with.’ Isherwood reports a fine conversation with Aldous Huxley on ‘a favourite topic: the poorness of all literature’: Homer was terribly overrated, Dante was hopelessly limited, Shakespeare was such a stupid man, Goethe was such a bore, Tolstoy was silly etc. We had disposed of nearly everybody, and ...”

“... kinds of writer. On the washstand shelf the narrator of At Swim Two Birds places books by Aldous Huxley beside those by James Joyce. In similar vein O’Nolan will later adapt Huysmans’s A Rebours to several of the governing tropes in The Third Policeman, while all the time his text criticises Huysmans’s values. Later still, he will contrast ...”

“... because the novel is set in 17th-century France, and concerns the devils of Loudun – Aldous Huxley published his account of this celebrated case in 1952. In fact, we have to jump over two largish fences to get to Johnson’s book at all. In America it was published (in 1984) as an instance of ‘Nordic Literature’; in England it is offered ...”

“... cause to celebrate (Einstein, FDR); and those on otherwise unclassified friends (Auberon Herbert, Aldous Huxley, Namier himself). The collection ends with a long memoir, specially written (or perhaps ‘composed’: few, one is tempted to suggest, could make such good use of a dictaphone) for this volume, though shortened versions have since appeared ...”

“... off the strength of his present howl. Quoting the poignant suicide note of an illiterate lover, Aldous Huxley opined that sincerity was mainly a matter of talent, but that is misleading. The talent may get everything wrong, but the passion may come through pure, in spite of the wrongness, or even because of it. I doubt whether this applies to paint. A ...”

“... condoms washed down from those topless towers (‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ … ‘God, Aldous Huxley would love this!’). It may be different now. What is not different is that the Atlantic can indulge the foulest of moods. Do the occupants of duplex apartments ever worry at the prospect of lying paralytically seasick at the cost of many ...”

“... expensive collection of books, mainly erotica and modern first editions; he was especially keen on Aldous Huxley, corresponding with him (‘I’m afraid you must be tired of the sight of my notepaper and bad spelling’) and even persuading Huxley to dine with him. His father’s death in 1927, leaving him in charge of ...”

“... physical promiscuity which had become a Bloomsbury moral principle. In Those Barren Leaves Aldous Huxley portrays one of the girls of the period, who absurdly combines innocence with knowingness, observing that ‘contraception has outmoded chastity’ in tones which indicate all the simple fervour of a conventional nature. But for Vanessa there ...”

“... took a hard line on self-abuse – as Miller himself would no doubt have preferred to at the time. Aldous Huxley at least suggested a few practicable affectations. With Sebastian in Time Must Have a Stop, Miller believed himself to have ‘a certain affinity – the same poetic sensibility and the same obsessing, irresistible sensuality’. A speech by ...”

“... view of Ian Hamilton does two things: it sees something, in Hamilton’s own words on Aldous Huxley, ‘sad and impressive’ about the subsequent prose career; and it organises the biographies and reviews, gives them a theme, a ‘subtext’ even, that otherwise they might not have. Still, always underlying everything is the ...”