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“... of escape’ – escape from society. Finally (and to be taken foremost) is A Sort of Clowning by Richard Hoggart, perhaps the most usefully class-conscious English writer of our time. He created an accepted general idea of the British ‘working class’ in 1957, with The Uses of Literacy. He developed his concept, most recently, in his memoir, A Local ...”

“... and his philosophy, the German higher criticism, anthropology and comparative mythography, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and John Maynard Keynes (for being a renegade Eton-and-King’s man who thought the college needed shaking up). Lytton Strachey returned James’s contempt: ‘It’s odd that the provost of Eton should ...”

“... Stores, where on a large mahogany table there were laid out two piles of yellow pamphlets, both by Aldous Huxley, one called the Encyclopaedia of Pacifism. I left the OTC, but, unlike some of my school friends, I did not join the Peace Pledge Union. I believed in the possibility of a just war. The Spanish Civil War was for me just that, but a war waged solely ...”

“... view of Ian Hamilton does two things: it sees something, in Hamilton’s own words on Aldous Huxley, ‘sad and impressive’ about the subsequent prose career; and it organises the biographies and reviews, gives them a theme, a ‘subtext’ even, that otherwise they might not have. Still, always underlying everything is the callow, unexamined ...”

“... you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and Richard Ford would shake their heads if you were to read the novel as the dramatic monologue of a character whose optimism is merely an inversion of Richard Yates-style pessimism or a quality he’s been given to emphasise the ...”

“... at the wrong moment and abetting her husband’s neglect of his health. It is on Aldous Huxley’s testimony that we are informed of Lawrence’s condemnation of Frieda just before his death: ‘Frieda, you have killed me.’ Burgess, who admires the Huxleys, doesn’t question this, but argues that, whatever the cost, Lawrence needed Frieda ...”

“... years her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”

“... 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 Wheatley & Son, brought temporary relief ...”

“... Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with ...”

“... an inspiring manner is in some degree supported by the subsequent careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He ...”

“... a great deal to say. Would I ever talk to her, this creature from Mars, this character from an Aldous Huxley novel? I assumed not, but to my amazement I found a way of doing so, I do not know how, and straightaway we were walking together, slightly faster than I would have chosen, round and round the municipal flowerbeds that stretched from the hotel to ...”

“... is to weave through place and time with a guide as robust and detailed in his knowledge as, say, Richard Cobb is about France, albeit with diametrically opposite political analysis and enthusiasms. As a pamphleteer and radical, Davis is still very much on active service, though, as he remarked not so long ago, the programme of a radical in Los Angeles today ...”

“... 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 Hugh ...”

“... men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”