On 5th February 1932...almost three quarters of a century ago...a review of Aldous Huxley's new novel Brave New World appeared in The Daily Telegraph. The reviewer was Rebecca West who had established her own literary reputation after years in H.G. Wells' personal and political shadow. The short 250-word review is remarkable not only for its foresight into the affairs of the day and the dangers of the emerging totalitarianism but also for its prophetic grasp of the dangers of the course civilisation was hell-bent on pursuing. Here is Rebecca's review.

'Those who are easily shocked had better leave Mr Huxley's new fantasy on one side; noting, as they pass, that since this is a free country they are not compelled to read it. Those who are not easily shocked can settle down to enjoy what is not only the most accomplished novel Mr Huxley has yet written, but also the most serious religious work written for some years. One would say that the book was about a Utopia if it were not that a line of dreamers have given that originally noncommited term a sense of imagined perfection, for the book describes the world as Mr Huxley sees it may become, if certain modern tendencies grow dominant, and its character is rather of deduced abomination.

If one has a complaint to make it is that he does not explain to the reader in a preface how much justification he has for his horrid visions. It would add to the reader's interest if he knows that when Mr Huxley depicts the human race as propagating by means of germ cells removed from the body and fertilised in laboratories (so that the embryo developing a bottle) he is writing of a possibility that biologists are seeing not more remotely, let us say, than Leonardo da Vinci saw the aeroplane. And it would add to the reader's horror if he realised that the society which Mr Huxley represents as being founded on this basis is actually the kind of society that various living people have expressed a desire to establish.'

One of the more interesting aspects of the review is Rebecca West's remark that 'the book was the most serious religious work written for some years'. Subsequently Aldous Huxley wrote a sequel: Brave New World Revisited and then a quarter of a century later in 1954 he released the companion novel Island which portrayed a very different alternative future...and which few have read. These three books should be regarded as a single work of prophetic genius. But instead a whole generation schooled in the 1950s and now at the peak of their generational power have been force-fed Brave New World. Cock-up of conspiracy?

It was a glorious winter day in Purton. Perfect blue sky, a warm sun...this is March...with a touch of frost left on the ground after a clear starry night of freezing temperatures. I walked with John Papworth and Tempe up to the local family butcher shop at the western end of the village and then back through town stopping off at the Spar General Store on our way to Purton Farm to pick up a few pounds of potatoes at the opposite eastern end beyond St Mary's Parish Church and the Old Tithe Barn.

I made some inroads into my e-mail inbox in the afternoon while John was taking his daily afternoon nap in true Churchillian manner. Pinkfire is a local Purton-based web design and digital origination business. Jane Stevens is now looking after digital origination of the five issues a year of Fourth World Review that are sent across the world for local printing in India, New Zealand and North America. I have been agitating unsuccessfully for many months to get the last eight issues sent to me in Adobe pdf format so I could bring the website up to date and make downloading and local printing possible to everybody. In fact I was beginning to despair of ever getting any response. In the changeover to Pinkfire from Geoff Ellis who had been looking after this side of our Fourth World Review business for more than twenty years I had been dropped from the mailing list. I requested the latest digital file from Pinkfire and this had come back immediately. Also five of the other seven missing files had come in from Helen Dew in New Zealand. Glad tidings indeed.

The Radcon Planning Group met for an hour and a half from five to half past six and stayed together for dinner and some fairly heavy drinking over a few games of three-card brag. I had terrible hands all evening but managed to keep my pot of winnings pretty much intact from the night before. The Planning Group set up a sub-committee for web communications…myself, Adam Crosland and Kate Cuzons. While John was preparing dinner we signed up for a radcon weblog on MySpace...a site with a younger feel. This site will now be used for internal communication.

Ali James motored over from Oxford to sit in on the meeting and stayed with us until after midnight. He is instrumental in plans to develop the university church of St Mary The Virgin into an Oxford-based version of St Martin’s in the Field…my meeting place of choice in central London as it is right by Trafalgar Square and convenient for Charing Cross Station. We were discussing ways in which the September conference in Swindon and the planned developments at St Mary’s could dovetail in together. John will be inaugurating a series of Academic Inn Dinner-Discussions on Tuesday 9th May as part of this process.