Aldous Huxley
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Towards a Brave New World October 06, 2023
Dog owners can tell when their pets are bored. They are aware of the satisfaction an animal experiences when carrying out something they learned earlier, even if it’s just coming to heel. Some dogs encourage their owners to engage in demanding activi...
Orwell, Huxley and the Path to Truth March 10, 2023
In this transitionary period, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) come to mind whenever the word dystopia is spoken of as the two pioneering cult texts. These classic dystopias seem to depict complet...
Devils in the Mind July 20, 2022
Aldous Huxley was in certain respects a modern disenchanted intellectual, and he had no use for actual demons; but there are persons as serious and sane as he was who can state with authority that demons and demonic possession are real....
Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy July 05, 2022
When I was a teenager, I came across Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945). I was so inspired by its array of mystical jewels that, like a magpie, I stole it from my school’s library. I still have that copy, sitting beside me. Next, I devou...
Oracles of the Sybille February 02, 2021
In 1975, I was commissioned to interview Sybille Bedford, by then a leading light in the literary world. She lived in a small house in Chelsea. As I got out my notebook, she said, ‘I hope you are not going to ask me about my life.’ She spoke freely a...
Orwell, Huxley, and Us November 20, 2020
To hear some people tell it, America entered a dystopia long before the coronavirus and measures undertaken to combat it altered everyday life almost to the point of unrecognizability. As for which dystopia, and when, well — that depends on whom one ...
Sybille Bedford: A Gifted Writer but a Monstrous Snob November 11, 2020
Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal process and a memoir. Selina Hastings has written a wonderful biography, with lashings of lesbian lovers, which provides a soundtrack to one ver...
Dedicated to Literature April 29, 2020
The convention is that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse, but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on...
'Brave New World' in Aldous Huxley's Former Home August 06, 2017
What's it like to discuss a classic in the home of the author who wrote it?...
