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“... he was as authentic as a demon can be. This is the story of Loudun. We already know it, for Aldous Huxley, writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun (1952), which John Whiting turned into a play, The Devils (1961), which was itself the basis for Ken Russell’s 1971 film of the same name. There is also a more ...”

“... writing, her knowledge of wine, her love affairs (mostly with women), and her friendships – with Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas and others – Bedford writes with touching modesty of all of this, as she does of her ‘intermittent brushes with the catastrophic events of the century’. A narrator rather than a raconteur, the intersections of her own life ...”

“... in the sense of telling you what to do – and, more particularly, what not to do: as Aldous Huxley observed, he could be ‘bloodthirstily censorious’. Lawrence had a philosophy, or as he self-deprecatingly put it, a ‘pseudo-philosophy’, coupled with a strong urge to dish out spiritual advice. ‘I want folk – English folk – to ...”

“... interests will be disappointed. Love of Beginnings has none of the factuality of a novel by Aldous Huxley or Simone de Beauvoir. It is about as full of gossip as a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. In composing his autobiography, Pontalis made a very explicit choice of genre. He cast it, deliberately and decisively, in the lyrical, not in the ...”

“... his year at prep school, during the 1914-18 war, another from his cheerful time at Bedales, as an Aldous-Huxley-and-Yellow-Book-inspired highbrow (with still the vaguest notions about the facts of life); a layer from his service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, venereal disease department, in the desert of Cyrenaica and ...”

“... often in the apocalyptic idiom constructed for the purpose and explored in Norman Cohn’s works. (Aldous Huxley, in Overy’s quotation, sees ‘Belial’s guiding hand’ in modern history.) There are good reasons in European history why the sense that ‘we’ – however defined – feel under threat from outside enemies or inner demons is not ...”

“... a funereal coat, dine artistically, and then among sickly virgins, take an idiotic stance’ – Aldous Huxley sees, in that stanza, all modern life. But this is only the posture of the Modern, something with which Eliot would simply begin. Lawrence distinguished between the gimmicks of Modernism which make the cerebral Clifford Chatterley a popular ...”

“... that after his move to Southern California Isherwood would recede into comfortable obscurity. Like Huxley, Chandler and Faulkner, he could make easy money in the movies and write on the side. (If a city can be an enemy of promise, Los Angeles would undoubtedly qualify.) Isherwood continued turning out his elegantly autobiographical fiction, but his ...”

“... the people and things that James hated and refused to countenance at King’s or Eton were: T.H. Huxley (‘a coarse 19th-century stinks man’), Henry Sidgwick and his philosophy, the German higher criticism, anthropology and comparative mythography, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and ...”

“... Hamilton evokes the stints in Hollywood of various distinguished figures – Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Nathanael West, the photogenic Faulkner – but also looks at the careers of resident screenwriters, like Dudley Nichols and Nunnally Johnson. He charts the war efforts of Hollywood writers, studies the battles for credits surrounding Citizen ...”

“... Nobel Prize-winning seriousness – our only novelist to be tagged an intellectual was Aldous Huxley, and by the side of Canetti he was Fred Astaire. I was forgetting that not only did Canetti live in Hampstead from 1939 until quite recently (he’s still in the London telephone directory) but he also spent – as related in his first volume ...”

“... Men’, ‘Among Women’, ‘Between Men and Women’, ‘Youth and Age’, and so on. Aldous Huxley did this very successfully long ago in an excellent anthology called Texts and Pretexts, which ought to be reprinted: but it is a dangerous thing to do, because the anthologist himself can sound too wise, too knowing or too perky among the ...”

“... The present century has lived beneath a cloud of gloomy prophecies, but it will not always be so: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have not extinguished hope, or at least the determination to extract some joy from life, however cruel life might be. Security, serenity and success may not necessarily be the goals for which most people will always aim. There ...”

“... pieces had a revival in the Twenties and Thirties of this century and an explicit influence on Aldous Huxley, who, however, fatally lacked Peacock’s tenderness for women and his poetic grace. Marilyn Butler speaks, at one point, of his Mozartian sparkle. Mozart is indeed a source, The Marriage of Figaro especially, for Peacock’s mischievous ...”

“... expresses something like the lust for the sun which enticed post-war dissidents and exiles such as Aldous Huxley and Norman Douglas and D.H. Lawrence and Osbert Sitwell to the hot beaches of the Mediterranean and the ‘lakes of light’ in Northern Italy and Mexico. But Haggard was not their kind, and with the exception of a trip to Egypt, after the war ...”