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Hello in Shakespeare's play The Tempest the character Miranda declares when

confronted by a group of young men of whom on her isolated

island she has never seen the like, oh wonder how many godly creatures are there here, how

beauteous mankind is, oh brave new world that has such people in it.

It's perhaps the only known if Shakespeare had been made famous by someone else,

for brave new world isn't generally associated with Prospero's

island of Sprites and Mayhem, Magic and Wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley's

dystopia, a Gugenics, 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 prophecy in which the hopes and fears of the 1920s and 1930s are at large.

But why did Huxley feel the need to write this and his brave new world really as dystopian

as we are led to believe?

With me to discuss Hux' Brave New World are Daniel Pig, Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London,

...