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“... had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his own pride in it, when compared to his influence on the American reading public, which he counted for nothing. In his later years, Schlesinger was ...”

“... expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sight of the hindquarters of Nancy Cunard’. For glimpses of the rest of her see Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington (twice), Evelyn Waugh, Michael Arlen and Aldous Huxley. As one might anticipate, Nancy Cunard is a favourite with Amos: often copied, and unfailingly good copy. Indeed, he finds it hard to mention her without ...”

“... are essentially not about the past, but about the retrospect to it of some subsequent present. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age demonstrates another, and less indirect, approach to the emotional texture of the past: the difficult excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people’s lives – one might call it the mood ...”

“... he has written a novel called The Memorial; lives with his mother and a younger brother called Richard; works on a movie; has fashionable but uncontroversial left-wing ideas (he speaks himself of his ‘parlour socialism’); confesses to small acts of cowardice. But we know far more about the quality of his attention to the world than we know about ...”

“... to each except the last, which is followed by a chapter-length Postlude. Letters to Craft from Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard are newly included. Letters (also to Craft) from Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, Glenn Gould and other musical luminaries are also published for the first time; and most of the illustrations are new. Gone are the itineraries ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of as only partially understood. The Vedanta centre is where Isherwood began his training – in Richard Alpert’s expression, ‘to become nothing’. The world is seen as mad, and forces the weary traveller from Europe to subject himself to a difficult regime of retreat and quiet. A ‘homesickness for sanity’ is the one valid reason for putting oneself ...”

“... cells, ant colonies, telephone systems, supermarket chains, television and religion. As his hero, Richard Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s ...”

“... I would go into the book department, where I stumbled across a pile of canary yellow pamphlets by Aldous Huxley. One was called the ‘Encyclopedia of Pacifism’. Under the influence of these pamphlets I decided to leave the OTC. The master in charge of my section – who was famous for his evening prowls through the boys’ bathrooms, floating his hand ...”

“... a reflection of the hold which Eton has over Britain’s Establishment that a talented writer like Richard Ollard can devote a year or more of his time to a book about a single school during a short period of its history. Where else in the world could such a book be written and not gather dust at the back of old-fashioned bookshops? Ollard mentions in his ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”

“... from his unpublished novel or unperformed plays; and as for gossip – wow! up in the class of Richard Aldington, particularly when the target is someone he doesn’t like. Alma Mahler is that ‘noisy, witless woman’ who ‘dominates the scene through boasting, greed and liquor’. At the funeral of her daughter Manon Gropius, she produces ...”

“... 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 detest any ...”