Sunday, 15 March 2009

Huxley and the Bookmen

I have just posted the following on The Observer website after Robert McCrum called there for a biography of Huxley – none, he said, having appeared since Sybille Bedford's in 1973/74.  Further words fail me.  I don't like, as it were, blowing my own trumpet but it is important to set the record straight.

I am astonished at Robert McCrum's comments. Does he not know that his own paper reviewed my major new biography of Huxley, "Aldous Huxley: an English Intellectual" in 2002, the first for 30 years, incorporating much hitherto unrevealed material? It was described by Roy Jenkins as "the best literary biography I have ever encountered" and is described in the DNB and the Oxford History of English Literature as the standard biography of Huxley and there are still plenty of copies of the paperback today in Foyle's. It also won the approval of Sybille Bedford herself. Has no one on The Observer heard of Google?
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1 comment:

  1. Stephen Mitchelmore15 March 2009 at 10:33

    I seem to remember your biography getting front page treatment in the TLS.

    http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25358-1926159,00.html

    Incidentally, why has McCrum replaced the more interesting bloggers on the Guardian's Book Blog? It seems to have gone from provocative, albeit in a rather clueless manner, back to boring, conservative and irrelevant.

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