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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

A Huxley

 

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Thomas Henry Huxley : 

'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Brave New World

'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong      Print: Book

  

Thomas Huxley : [unknown]

'The [1890s] dockers' leader Ben Tillett went hungry in order to buy books ... [and] thereby struggled through the literary classics, as well as works on evolution by Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley ... after his day's work in the warehouse.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Ben Tillett      Print: Book

  

Thomas Huxley : Life

'[Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland was] an omnivorous reader -- "she could begin the day with reports on technical education in Prussia, continue it with Huxley's 'Life' and Shakespeare, and ... polish off seven love-stories at the same time ..."'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland      Print: Unknown

  

Thomas Henry Huxley : [unknown]

'after tea [W.J. Brown] would enjoy "five glorious hours of freedom" reading Darwin, Huxley and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" at the Battersea Public Library'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: William John Brown      Print: Book

  

Thomas Henry Huxley : [unknown]

'After a miserable Catholic school education...periodic unemployment allowed [Joseph Toole] to study in the Manchester Reference Library. There he discovered, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Emerson, Dickens, Morris, Blatchford, Shaw and Wells, and of course John Ruskin..."Study always left me with a deep feeling that there was so much amiss with the world. It seemed that it had been started at the wrong end, and that it was everybody's business to put the matter right".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Toole      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : 

[Lehmann and her first husband, Leslie Runcimann] 'were great readers, particularly of modern novelists such as Huxley, Lawrence and Gerhardie.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : 

[Lehmann and her first husband, Leslie Runcimann] 'were great readers, particularly of modern novelists such as Huxley, Lawrence and Gerhardie.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Runcimann      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : [unknown]

'The fresh-sounding work of the war generation, which began to appear in the late 1920s and early 1930s, provided him with important models. Huxley, Wells and Aldington (especially "Death of a Hero") were rapidly digested; his poetic models were Edith Sitwell, Aldington, Nichols, Sassoon and Graves (in the cheap Benn's Sixpenny Poets editions), to be followed by the more lasting influences of Eliot and D.H. Lawrence...He read an essay by Lawrence in which he showed how England treated its writers. That, he said, made him decide "to swim against the current".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell      Print: Book

  

A Huxley : [unknown]

'I am forming my opinions mainly from what I read in books on economies, politics, history, etc. I read the daily papers, but I do not take a lot of notice of what I read in them from the point of view of their opinions on the war, and what shall be done after it. I get far more satisfaction from reading articles or books by authors such as C.E.M. Joad, H.G.Wells and Huxley.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group:      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Ends and Means

'Ends and Means contains much that is good and new. Also his essays are quite attractive, his novels are utter tripe.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group:      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Brave new world

'I like his Brave New World but I do not think any of his other books are much good, in fact they bore me profoundly.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group:      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Encyclopaedia of pacifism

'A master's debate at school set me thinking, and I decided for myself as far as I could at that age. At 16 I joined the Under Thirty movement where I heard a debate on Pacifism. I read a book by Dick Shepherd about the PPU, but did not think of joining it. Also a book called "Why War?" and parts of Aldous Huxley's "Encyclopaedia of Pacifism." At first books were the main influence and then debates developed it.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group:      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Two or Three Graces

Sunday 25 July 1926: 'Mrs Hardy said to me, do you know Aldous Huxley? [...] They had been reading his book, which she thought "very clever". But Hardy could not remember it.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas and Florence Hardy     Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : [unknown]

'Sydney [Larkin's father] gave him free run of his library and his appetite for books grew enormously. "Thanks to my father", he wrote later: "our house contained not only the principal works of most main English writers in some form or other (admittedly there were exceptions, like Dickens), but also nearly-complete collections of authors my father favoured - Hardy, Bennett, Wilde, Butler and Shaw, and later on Lawrence, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Sydney Larkin      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Vulgarity in Literature

'Today I bought and read Aldous Huxley's essay Vulgarity in Literature. It's a surprisingly powerful thing, one of those treats in reading, of which our modern authors never afford me more than one a year. But much of the lighter pleasure it gave me was due to my having met him last week at your house & all the time he seemed to be saying it inside your amber drawing-room; ( where by the way I usually feel like a fly in amber). so I think I must thank you for what a great pleasure my last visit has brought me.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Walter D'Arcy Cresswell      

  

Aldous Huxley : On the Margin

I’ll tell you what I think of ‘Golgotha’. I think it is a prodigious cataract of eloquence, managed with astonishing skill and verve, but too diffuse by far in its movement and somewhat naïve in its philosophy. Do you realise that the main ideas in it are the ideas that dominated such as myself 25 years ago? [Aldous Huxley] is a fine journalist, & I thought that the best things in 'On the Margin' were as good as such things could be. They were about equal to, though quite different from, the essays of that master, Robert Lynd.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett      Print: Book

  

Aldous Huxley : Brave New World

'Had Aldous Huxley been as richly endowed with imagination as with intellectual penetration, his "Brave New World" might have been a truly creative challenge to our machine age. But, lacking the moral indignation and the humanising solicitude of Swift, he fails in his Savage to create a real sponsor for humanity. And the superficiality of his philosophy is shown in the last scene.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: William Soutar      Print: Book

  

Julian Huxley : Africa View

February 15th was the date chosen for the next time and the subject “Books that people have been reading”


Meeting held at Oakdene: Northcourt Av.–15.2.38 Sylvanus A. Reynolds in the Chair.


1. Minutes of last read and approved

[...]


4. The first reading came from Reginald Robson who gave us an amusing extract from “Beasts & Superbeasts” by H. H. Munro


5. Mary S. Stansfield read from “Lawrence by his Friends” some interesting impressions contributed by some of these friends to a book edited by Lawrence’s brother. One passage by a man who knew Lawrence as a fellow aircraftman gave us a picture of him as a thoroughly likeable and popular hero, admired for his prowess as a motorcyclist.


6. Howard L. Sikes then read from Africa View by Julian Huxley. The passage concerned the respective advantages of Indirect and Direct Rule[...]. This reading produced considerable discussion on the same questions, and spread over on to the attitude of the French and the British toward their African dependant peoples, and members found something to ask or to say about almost every corner of Africa[...].


7. Elizabeth T. Alexander followed with an entertaining reading from Halliday Sutherland’s “A time to keep”. We shall carry in our minds for some time the dramatic appearance of Red William in his nightshirt urging the ladies in evening dress to run for their lives.


8. Roger Moore gave us some excellent fun in his reading from Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Autobiography, and we made some discoveries about Charles Lamb and Wordsworth too.


9. F. E. Pollard, greatly daring, then read from the “Comments of Bagshott” [sic] some shrewd remarks about the male and female of the human species[...].


10. H. R. Smith completed the programme with some well chosen paragraphs from “Those English” by Carl [i.e. Curt] von Stutterheim.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Howard L. Sikes      Print: Book

 

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