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“... In her memoir​  Kiss Hollywood Goodbye Anita Loos recalls her friend Aldous Huxley’s ‘childish love for picnics’. One excursion he organised ‘might have taken place in Alice in Wonderland’. Huxley had gathered a choice selection of his Californian friends: Charlie Chaplin and his wife, Paulette Goddard, dressed ‘in a Mexican peasant outfit’; Greta Garbo, wearing a ‘sloppy pair of men’s trousers and a battered hat with a brim that hid her face’; the visiting Bertrand Russell; Christopher Isherwood; and Huxley’s favourite mystic, Krishnamurti, accompanied by a retinue of Theosophists and vegetarian catering ladies in saris ...”

“... and tried to unite them with a more congenial inheritance from Petronius Arbiter, Peacock and Aldous Huxley, with a soupçon of Firbank. Peter Levi, who was a friend of Connolly’s and married his widow, has brought the tale to an ending, making his task possible by briskly disposing of all the clues Connolly himself had perhaps despaired of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1932,​ Aldous Huxley published The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, a large brown volume, printed in a curiously elaborate type, which has no doubt become something of a special item in booksellers’ catalogues. It contained 889 pages. Exactly 30 years later Harry T. Moore edited The Collected Letters of D ...”

“... 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 throwing in a curious or vulgar little footnote: ‘Nancy Cunard seems to have had lovers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the presenters don’t make matters any easier; John Lehmann, for example, speaks to Aldous Huxley as if he were questioning him with a view to offering him something at the Foreign Office. Which just goes to show that broadcasting vices existed long before the days of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. None of the English writers on the ...”

“... erudite, wittily and unobtrusively learned. High culture, wide culture, men of letters, like Aldous Huxley, who indeed was then still alive ... It was the exact opposite of Brain of Britain. And Anthony Burgess was brilliant at it. Easy, smiling, courteous, uncompetitive, he was absolutely deadly when it came to the details of name and ...”

“... 1930s things inevitably began to slide. A £250,000 loss was made on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Aldous Huxley, who visited in May 1931 for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, noted that Britain, once an iron-making pioneer, had long since been overtaken. Bolckow Vaughan had collapsed into Dorman Long in the 1920s, Dorman Long was nationalised to become part ...”

“... he was a ‘great decaying mushroom’; to D.H. Lawrence, an ‘incorrigible worm’; though Aldous Huxley thought him more of a ‘slug’ who (with regard to Lawrence) had invented a new literary genre, the ‘vindictive hagiography, malice expressed in terms of worship’. So the comedy of abuse rattled on, losing something of its humour as it ...”

“... their command of spectacle and song, pity and terror. ‘Aeschylus tragical on stilts,’ sighed Aldous Huxley. ‘Bawling sublimities through a tortured mouth-hole!’ It is not for his ‘artistic merit’ that I would compare him with those old Greeks, only for his choice of medium. The crowd-poetry of Aeschylus did not persist: only the script ...”

“... In​ ‘The Best Picture’, an essay written in 1925, Aldous Huxley calls Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection ‘the greatest picture in the world’:Great it is, absolutely great … because its author possessed almost more than any other painter those qualities of character which I most admire and because his purely aesthetic preoccupations are of a kind which I am by nature best fitted to understand ...”

“... laconically puts it, ‘many ups and downs’. The first was written as a schoolgirl dazzled by Aldous Huxley, the second begun at Oxford but torn up as too autobiographical. Some Tame Gazelle dates from the mid-Thirties, but wasn’t published (in revised form) until 1950. Its successor, Civil to Strangers, is the fourth novel to appear since Barbara ...”

“... Arnold, brother-in-law of W.E. Forster, father of Mrs Humphry Ward, grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley and of Mrs G.M. Trevelyan. His knockabout career helped enlarge his connections. At Oxford he stood on even closer terms of friendship with Clough than did his brother Matthew, despite all the effusive lamentation of the latter’s ...”

“... real goodbye to Berlin. Whatever else, the discipline could not be drug-induced. Unlike Aldous Huxley, tripping away nearby, Isherwood doubted drugs. Swami did not approve of them either. Isherwood tripped on mescaline in London and that seemed agreeable enough, ending up (familiar story) with a giggling fit in Westminster Abbey. ...”