Themes and Variations: The Aldous Huxley Podcast

9. Huxley and Billionaires Power, technology, artificial intelligence, and the danger of falling asleep at the wheel of civilization. In this episode of Themes and Variations , we return to Aldous Huxley’s novels, as well as Ends and Means , to ask a question that feels urgently contemporary: what would Huxley have made of today’s billionaires? Toby is joined once again by Robin Hull, curator of t...

In this episode of Themes and Variations , we explore the topic of pain in Huxley’s work, bringing his literary and philosophical reflections together into dialogue with contemporary neuroscience. Emily interviews Ryan O’Shea, a PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, whose work explores religion and pain in literary modernism. The conversation traces how pain shifts across Huxley’s car...

In this episode of Themes and Variations , Toby and Robin turn to Grey Eminence , Aldous Huxley’s 1941 historical study of the monk-statesman Father Joseph and the Thirty Years’ War, and use it as a lens for Huxley’s wider philosophy: spirituality versus organised religion, distraction versus consciousness, and why political reform fails without inner transformation. The central question discussed...

In this episode, we are delighted to interview Dr Gerri Kimber who is a world authority on Katherine Mansfield, a central figure in literary modernism. Gerri is the author of a brand new biography - Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life , now available from Reaktion Press . This episode focuses on Huxley’s early years as a writer. While most people are more familiar with his later novels, such as Bra...

In this very special episode to commemorate the third annual Huxley Day, and in collaboration with the Aldous Huxley Centre Zürich, Toby and Emily speak to some of the teenagers involved in a recent cinematic adaptation of Brave New World . The film, Follow Me , provides a fresh and incisive take on Huxley’s classic dystopia, speaking to contemporary manifestations of paranoia and control in our d...

In the 1930s, as authoritarian leaders tightened their grip across the world world, Aldous Huxley threw himself into the pacifist movement and the Peace Pledge Union. His 1937 book Ends and Means became the pacifist manifesto of the era, built on one simple but devastating premise: bad means produce bad outcomes, always . This was a direct shot at utilitarianism and the Machiavellian logic that “t...

The latest episode of Themes and Variations , the Aldous Huxley podcast, explores a facet of his life many biographies gloss over: Huxley and his wife Maria lived in what we’d now call an open or polyamorous relationship. But here’s the twist—it wasn’t some free-love utopia. It was messy, painful, and required Maria to scout sexual partners for her “cerebrotonic” husband. She’d arrange dinners wit...

What if the “self” you think you know isn’t one single person, but a crowd of selves constantly shifting, colliding, and negotiating within you? Aldous Huxley believed exactly that—and it’s one of the reasons his writing on psychology, relationships, and therapy feels so radical even today. In the latest episode of Themes and Variations: The Aldous Huxley Podcast , Tobias Harris, Emily Reed and Ro...

Imagine a writer so multifaceted, his ideas ripple across politics, spirituality, and ecology decades after his death. That writer is Aldous Huxley. Known widely for his novel Brave New World , Huxley was far more than just a novelist. He was a polymath and a pacifist who believed deeply in humanity’s potential—and its peril. In the first episode of the "Themes and Variations" podcast, hosts Tobia...