Books & Boots

One bright May morning in 1953, under careful supervision, Aldous Huxley swallowed ‘four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results’. Fifty or so pages long in the Penguin edition, this is a long essay or testimony, in which he reports the results.

‘There are no limits. Everybody’s capable of anything — but anything.
(The Arch-Vicar of Belial in ‘Ape and Essence’, page 101)

‘Ape and Essence’ is Huxley’s ninth novel. It’s a dystopian science fiction story, often overlooked in Huxley’s oeuvre, very much overshadowed by ‘Brave New World’ from 16 years earlier, in 1932. This is because,...

Aldous Huxley spent the years after the end of the Great War Huxley living and travelling abroad. In 1937 he settled in California and this novel is the first fruit of his new home, in several ways.

1) The most obvious one is that it is actually set in California, amid the orange groves of southern California, to be precise in the oversize...

Here we are again, at the 258th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. I can’t claim to have been to all 258, but I’ve been to enough to know what to expect, namely that the Academy’s 14 first floor galleries, ranging from the small to the big to the enormous, will be overflowing with the usual super-abundance of art works, of all shapes, sizes, formats and genres, from optimistic ...

I should like to understand myself properly before it’s too late.

Everything is full, existence everywhere, dense and heavy and sweet. (p.149)

The Nausea, fear, existence… it would be better to keep all that to myself. (p.200)

It is Monday 29 January 1932 and the narrator, An...