“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”