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“... America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and Christopher Isherwood (‘Mystical America’). As the chapter titles suggest, each of these writers is supposed to see America as if it were shaped by a literary genre or in conformity to some cluster of ...”

“... strung between two dreams. The first, in the high Mojave desert and in eyeshot of the place where Aldous Huxley first took mescalin, is the site of the socialist city of Llano del Rio, a utopian colony founded in 1914 and dispersed by external hostility and internal stresses four years later. It is, as Davis writes at the start of his book, the best ...”

“... the expatriates everything that a sophisticated young girl might have wished for. Taken to meet Aldous Huxley (‘a writer whose work I idolised’ – hence the later biography), Billi ‘felt like some girls are said to feel when taken to their first dance before they are allowed to wear the clothes that they like’. (Her ...”

“... looked and began to understand.’ Word soon reached the top that the young trainee (now devouring Aldous Huxley and Dornford Yates, and trying to write like Arnold Bennett) might be of use in the publicity department, and there he pulled off a coup demanding a fusion of technical knowledge and showmanship: he managed not only to sell a dud line in ...”

“... cent of drug convictions in the UK are for that least heinous of crimes, possession of cannabis. Aldous Huxley called drug-taking a ‘chemical vacation from intolerable selfhood’, though he was speaking of the thoughtful, benevolent, organic substances like mescaline. Dr Johnson spoke more robustly of intoxication: ‘He that makes a beast of himself ...”

“... on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and ...”

“... a novelist, supposedly talking with equals, may offend his readers and spoil his plain story, as Aldous Huxley did, making us feel he is patronising us, showing off. Burgess knows his pupils’ reluctance to follow his ‘musical’ programmes. Discussing his novel, Napoleon Symphony, he breaks off with ‘Too fanciful?’ and mocks our ...”

“... Frieda’s sense of the novel’s ‘form’, makes the proper companion piece to Worthen. Aldous Huxley called Frieda the stupidest woman he had ever met, and no doubt she was, in his sense: but at this stage of their relationship her intuition had an uncanny understanding of what Lawrence himself hardly knew he was doing, or trying to do. It was ...”

“... of the British Empire’. There were nationwide celebrations at the time of his bicentenary, and Aldous Huxley described him as ‘the finished product of an old and ordered civilisation’. His embodiment of genteel English civilisation no doubt helped inspire the interesting decision in the 1960s to shift the blitzed church of St Mary Aldermanbury ...”

“... it became the ‘village school of the Bloomsbury intellectual’ – the school to which Aldous Huxley, Victor Gollancz, Ernst Freud and Barbara Hepworth sent their children. It held to project-oriented progressive pedagogy but also now prepared its pupils for university entrance exams.Dorothy’s wealth sustained this whole show, and while ...”

“... from supplying anecdotes. One of the more striking was an account of the schoolboy Blair defending Aldous Huxley, who was brought in to Eton as a temporary master during the First World War when qualified teachers were scarce. By then nearly blind, Huxley was tormented by the boys until Blair intervened. It is, as ...”

“... Conrad’s ‘consuming passion’ for treating his life as the material for fiction, and the way Aldous Huxley had ‘borrowed’ the agonising death of Naomi Mitchison’s son from meningitis for Point Counter Point. He lacked Waugh’s genuine passion for snobbery and religion, and took time to develop his own disagreeable substitute for ...”

“... decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors of Perception … what an Ojai-geeky-too-LA-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.’ Babitz’s famous boyfriends didn’t become famous until after she knew them. ‘So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing ...”

“... dingy flat in Bayswater, where over the years Yeats and Graham Greene, W.H. Davies, T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley were among those who came for tea and buns under a single, unshaded electric light bulb. It also added lustre to some of her put-downs. Dealing with a Boston psychiatrist who demanded to know why she wrote about Christ rather than mankind, she ...”

“... entries that mention everyone from Bertrand Russell to D.H. Lawrence, from Ottoline Morrell and Aldous Huxley to the painters Anne Estelle Rice and J.D. Fergusson, to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Dora Carrington. The footnotes also work with the stories themselves, as another kind of writing that speaks back to them, or from them. It’s the business of ...”