'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
[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
[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
'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
'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: anon Print: Book
'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: anon Print: Book
'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: anon Print: Book
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
'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
'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
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
'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
