Aldous Huxleyby Nicholas Murray, Little, Brown, £20, ISBN 0316854921
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…
