Word: huxley
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...ALDOUS HUXLEY, by John Atkins; THE HUXLEYS, by Ronald W. Clark. Human being or controlled experiment? Guru or walking encyclopaedia? The often contradictory legend left by this brilliant member of a renowned intellectual family is examined by two biographers who almost find the missing link...
...ALDOUS HUXLEY, by John Atkins; THE HUXLEYS, by Ronald W. Clark. Cynic or mystic? Humanist or cold fish? Both books get close to the answers as they dissect the puzzling genius whose family contributed more than its share of intellectual heavyweights...
Baby Mine! The obligation to be clever in some way came as a birthright-rather reverently if hastily tracked through three generations by Family Biographer Ronald Clark. Above Aldous' cradle brooded the example of his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, a brilliant biologist and a public defender of Darwin when Origin of Species was shocking fundamentalists. Representing a kind of caretaker generation, Aldous' father Leonard devoted most of his life to a two-volume biography reciting the achievements of T.H. and looking forward with confidence to his own chil dren's outdoing him. No one is quite sure...
Tall (6 ft. 4 in. by the time he was 15) and myopic, Huxley grew up through Eton and Oxford to live in a thin, rarefied world of his own. His notion of conversation, Osbert Sitwell grumbled, was to relay data on the "incestuous mating of melons" or the "curious amorous habits of cuttlefish." In words that Clark applies to all the Huxleys, young Aldous seemed less a human being than "something more nearly approaching a controlled experiment...
...love, in the early novels (Crome Yellow, Antic Hay and Point Counter Point), it meant sex. And sex to Huxley was disgusting man at his most disgusting-something that he approached, as that prophet of passion D. H. Lawrence put it, with the "desperate courage of repulsion." The poem attributed to one of Huxley's characters in Ape and Essence is unmistakably in the author's voice...