Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Huxley, Aldous

Huxley, Aldous

Crome Yellow, [34] 74; The Devils of Loudun, [55] 60

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20120601111230 Nicholas Murray on Aldous Huxley, Mark Handley

Blight, Mildew and Smut

Nicholas Murray on Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

One of the consequences of being Aldous Huxley’s biographer was that I was invited to Eton, where a 17-year-old schoolboy with the bearing of a middle-aged barrister extended a hand and told me he had read Crome Yellow ‘in my father’s library’. In my mind’s eye I saw a book-lined room opening on to a stone terrace in some country pile like the one in the novel. But then I remembered that the book had been written in a shady back street in the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi in the hot early summer of 1921.
20170901152848

Trouble at the Convent

Kate Tyte on Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun

Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) – a book that could easily be subtitled ‘politically motivated witch-hunts and how to avoid them’ – feels horribly relevant. The Devils is about the supposed possession of a convent of nuns, thanks to the alleged witchcraft of a Catholic priest with a sex life that reads like Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It includes exorcisms, torture and Byzantine political manoeuvrings by an untouchable elite.

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