As the grandson of Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley, and the great nephew of Matthew Arnold, he seemed to embody the double inheritance of the Victorian age.

ECONOMIST: Writers' lives

In fact, by the 1960s Los Angeles had played host, however fleetingly, to a huge variety of authors, musicians and artists, among them Bertolt Brecht, Joan Didion, Jascha Heifetz, David Hockney, Huxley himself, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann, Robert Motherwell, Nathanael West, Artur Rubinstein, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.

ECONOMIST: Obituary