Nicholas Murray
Cerebrotonic Missives
Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley
By James Sexton
Ivan Dee 416pp £30
In April 1923, spotting the impossibly stylish Aldous and Maria Huxley on the deck of a cross-channel ferry to Dieppe, Virginia Woolf darted behind the funnel, ashamed of her bluestocking dowdiness. ‘I can’t think it right to look precisely like an illustration to Vogue,’ she wrote to Vanessa Bell, ‘and I dare say they thought the same t’other way round about us.’ Posterity, however, has had the last laugh, for the Woolf industry has devoted volume after volume to her novels, essays, diaries, letters and much else, while Huxley remains scandalously neglected by literary scholarship. No comprehensive critical editions of the novels, essays, or letters exist, and only two full biographies (with thirty years between them) and a handful of studies make up the brief critical reading list for Huxley.
James Sexton’s selected letters thus meet a need, but given that it is nearly forty years since Grover Smith’s Letters of Aldous Huxley was published one might have expected a little more in the way of editing or critical apparatus. The ordinary reader will often want some indication of what
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
literaryreview.co.uk
India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
literaryreview.co.uk
Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
literaryreview.co.uk