November 2013 marked fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also the passing of Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis, each prophetic in his own way.

Huxley’s most famous work Brave New World (1932) predicted that people would be bred like animals and graded according to their pre-destined place in society. As we will see, the idea had already been canvassed in fiction, and the Eugenics Society was busy working on the scientific breeding of humans. But has Huxley’s ‘brave new world’ come to pass?