Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World and its vision of a future of test tube babies, free love and round-the-clock surveillance.
Melvyn Bragg and guests David Bradshaw, Daniel Pick and Michele Barrett discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel, Brave New World.
In Act V Scene I of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the character Miranda declares 'O wonder! How many Godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O Brave new world! That has such people in it!'. It is perhaps the only line of Shakespeare to be made famous by someone else, for Brave New World is not associated with Prospero's Island of sprites, magic and wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley's dystopia of eugenics, soma and zero gravity tennis. A world, incidentally, upon which literary references to Shakespeare would be entirely lost.
Brave New World is a lurid, satirical dystopia in which the hopes and fears of the 1930s are writ large and yet the book seems uncannily prescient about our own time. But why did Huxley feel the need to write it and is Brave New World really as dystopian as we are led to believe?
Last on
Broadcasts
- Thu 9 Apr 2009 09:00大象传媒 Radio 4
- Thu 9 Apr 2009 21:30大象传媒 Radio 4
Featured in...
![]()
Author Archive Collection
A selection of programmes from the 大象传媒 archive - author interviews and profiles.
![]()
20th Century—In Our Time
Browse the 20th Century era within the In Our Time archive.
![]()
Culture—In Our Time
Popular culture, poetry, music and visual arts and the roles they play in our society.
In Our Time podcasts
Download programmes from the huge In Our Time archive.
The In Our Time Listeners' Top 10
If you鈥檙e new to In Our Time, this is a good place to start.
Arts and Ideas podcast
Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.
Podcast
-
![]()
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.
