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“... has been the mistress of Cocteau, Mussolini – Hitler for anything I know: came my way through Aldous Huxley; gave me a case of butterflies; and descends from time to time on me, with eyes like the roe of codfish phosphorescent: what’s underneath I don’t know.’ On a later occasion she refers to Ocampo as having ‘filched and pilfered and ...”

“... diverse cultural roots of Acid House music and its more recent offshoots. Unlike LSD, which from Aldous Huxley onwards attracted a self-appointed avant garde, concerned with shaping and directing the ‘consciousness revolution’, Ecstasy, in its post-Shulgin incarnation, has been a resoundingly democratic drug. Collin and Godfrey emphasise the ...”

“... on the part of younger men and women. Gosse spoke of ‘the nasty fads of the hour’, and Aldous Huxley thought Gosse ‘the bloodiest little old man I have ever ...”

“... and ‘rabblement’ of Ireland. But it is not clear that he reckons many of the others – Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and so on – to be indispensable. But then the book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no ...”

“... high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over a posh dinner than sit at home and read a new ...”

“... among the émigré colonies of the 1920s and 1930s. She was taken in, kind of adopted, by ‘the (Aldous) Huxleys’. She chauffeured a large black poodle across America for the (Thomas) Manns; she drank cocktails in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled ...”

“... the ‘Mister Heartbreak’ of the title derives from Berryman’s witty Englishing of his name to Aldous Huxley, from William Bradford to W.H. Auden, have discovered in America an unformulated open space hospitably ready to accommodate their private myths of self-realisation. To less determined or less visionary immigrants it offers a wide variety of ...”

“... make a more interesting book than Ollard on Eton even though it could not claim Keynes, Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Harold Macmillan among its illustrious ex-pupils. Like many other inner-city comprehensive schools, it has experienced since it was founded the harsh consequences of many of the social and economic changes which Britain is undergoing and to ...”

“... about her.’ Frieda may have been radiant but she was, by common consent, not very bright. Aldous Huxley considered her the stupidest woman he had ever met. Elaine Feinstein conveys the same idea but more effectively by means of the elegant sideswipes that she delivers so well when she needs to be uncomplimentary but not crudely so: ‘Frieda had ...”

“... to ward off the fragrant inducements of Hanoi Hannah. ‘No man, however highly civilised,’ Aldous Huxley wrote in The Devils of Loudun (1952), ‘can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. All we can safely predict is that, if exposed long ...”

“... children into white schools. His schoolmaster lent him English ‘left-wing’ books by Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as well as American ‘right-wing’ books by such as Ayn Rand: thus, Levy and his friends became ‘anti-prole’, holding exclusive wild parties for the pleasure of excluding football and basketball teams. His little gang was reprimanded for ...”

“... speaking a word, suffered a mental breakdown and died a virgin. ‘As a man he was a failure,’ Aldous Huxley said of him, ‘as a monster he was superb.’ Ferris writes well (he describes the reaction to Origin of Species as ‘so florid, compared to Darwin’s quiet reasonableness, that it flowed around the Origin like water around a rock’), and ...”

“... and the socially passed-over. The Criterion pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of provincialism. If ...”

“... for the people’ – anticipating by more than 350 years the drug-dependent society evoked by Aldous Huxley. What better way for elites to build and maintain their power than to create stress within a population by a culture of terror and then very kindly to offer the means for its alleviation by arranging such events? Smail calls the activities that ...”

“... beyond bearing – a wonder and a pain.’ The novel also records the death of D.H. Lawrence. Aldous Huxley ‘flattered our intellects’ but ‘Lawrence made us face what was in the dark of ourselves, whether we liked it or not.’ Ned is dismissive: ‘Anyone could do that if they put in all the dirty words.’ When Christine has some poems ...”