New Blog One: Newscientist

Tuesday, 30 October 2012

Newscientist

THIS is the first biography of Aldous Huxley for thirty years. It's based on much material unavailable until now and it's a brilliant job. Nicholas Murray is endlessly fascinating about the writer who became a symbol of intellectualism almost as much as Einstein did of science. Huxley's second novel, the satire Antic Hay, utraged the conventional majority, and Brave New World drew attacks bordering on hysteria—for his account of fetuses incubated in vitro and people kept in subjugation by a drug he called soma.

Huxley's output was prodigious. He wrote poetry, short stories, essays, novels, plays and journalism, while he himself—immensely tall and heavily bespectacled, with an unusual private life—was frequently news. Some were astonished at his friendship with D. H. Lawrence, whose ideas were apparently the antithesis of his own. This turned to consternation when the Huxleys moved to the ...