Brave new world

Aldous Huxley, William Shakespeare, the south of France, Venmo, the panic of 1893, and 7 other things worth your time.

There’s a small town in the south of France called Sanary-sur-Mer. I’ve never been there. It looks awfully nice on TripAdvisor.

Come to think of it, almost everything looks nice on TripAdvisor after being confined to my house for nearly a month. (Photo above. I love the blue.)

Anyway, the British author Aldous Huxley bought a house in Sansay-sur-Mer in 1930. During a burst of three or four months of intense, isolated work there, he produced what has to be his most famous novel, Brave New World.

I’m not sure I’d have made this connection two months ago, but it sounds like it was almost a self-imposed quarantine—a writer’s retreat for one.

I learned about Huxley’s writing environment after also reading that William Shakespeare might well have written both Macbeth and King Lear, while quarantined in London during an outbreak in 1606.

It seems there’s some controversy over whether you could take that to the bank, but if it’s untrue it’s a widely believed untruth anyway.

Regardless, Huxley …