Antic Hay

by Aldous Huxley

1923 · 256 pages

intellectual life
novelists
intellectuals
city and town life
london (england)
authors

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About this book

Antic Hay is one of Aldous Huxley's earlier novels, and like them is primarily a novel of ideas involving conversations that disclose viewpoints rather than establish characters; its polemical theme unfolds against the backdrop of London's post-war nihilistic Bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best: a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere, a novel that's always charged with excitement.

Quotes

From Wikiquote

“Beetles, black beetles” — his father had a really passionate feeling about the clergy. Mumbojumbery was another of his favourite words. An atheist and an anti-clerical of the strict old school he was.
“I am interested in everything,” interrupted Gumbril Junior. “Which comes to the same thing,” said his father parenthetically, “as being interested in nothing.”
He was wondering how any one could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence.
Political liberty’s a swindle because a man doesn’t spend his time being political. He spends it sleeping, eating, amusing himself a little and working ⁠— mostly working. When they’d got all the political liberty they wanted⁠ — or found they didn’t want⁠ — they began to understand this.