Excerpt from the first chapter 'Aldous' in "Aldous Huxley, An English Intellectural" by Nicholas Murray:

Listening to a recording of himself, pressed on vinyl in the summer of 1949, when he had lived in Southern California for more than a decade, Huxley reflected:

Language is perpetually changing; the cultivated English that I listened to as a child is not the same as the cultivated English spoken by young men and women today. But within the general flux there are islands of linguistic conservatism; and when I listen to myself objectively, from the outside, I perceive that I am one of those islands. In the Oxford of Jowett and Lewis Carroll, the Oxford in which my mother was brought up, how did people speak the Queen's English? I can answer with a considerable degree of confidence that they spoke almost exactly as I do. These recordings of 1950 are at the same time documents from the seventies and eighties of the last century.