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“... pacifist and left-wing views. After scrutinising the British Union of Fascists’ shopfront in the High Street and paying too much for a gin and lime at the Blue Boar Inn, he goes for a walk with a man in plus-fours, discussing local history, the League of Nations and the increasing likelihood of another war. Returning to his inn, he finds himself to be the ...”

“... to nurse Henry back to health. ‘He had an inexhaustible authority for me,’ he wrote to H.G. Wells on 10 September 1910, ‘and I feel abandoned and afraid, even as a lost child.’ It has often been assumed that the death of William was the strongest incentive for the writing of A Small Boy. Thus in his immensely useful compilation, A Henry James ...”

“... novels. Forster’s view of the celebrated and painful disagreement between James and H.G. Wells is expressed in Aspects of the Novel; he seems pleased rather than sympathetic to see James ridiculed, and even joins in the teasing. He firmly awards the judgment to Wells, a disquieting conclusion if you remember the ...”

“... solved, it went into production. In 1903, in a short story published in the Strand magazine, H.G. Wells had conjured up the idea of gigantic machines which he called ‘Land Ironclads’: they were now on the verge of becoming a reality. On 28 December a further conference was convened, this time with the happy task of finding an official name for the new ...”

“... been a different attitude towards the world of the Underground. In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells portrayed the beautiful, degenerate, soft-headed heirs of the aristocracy frolicking in the sunlight, prey, on dark nights, to the cannibalistic attentions of an underground-dwelling industrial proletariat. ‘There is a tendency to utilise underground ...”

“... probably have been noticed a great deal more, for Carr was an eminent left-wing historian, had a huge record of publication, and had embarked, 35 years before his death, on a History of Soviet Russia which has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a classic’. By the time he died, the 15th separate book of this History – The Twilight of the Comintern ...”

“... The layman explains his love of God, and his fondness for his ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular ...”

“... hand. She probably read them during the Twenties. The marked-up passages of the keen young high-school pupil offer an unerring foretaste of the mature writer. Underlinings at random, from Fors Clavigera: ‘The chief, and almost the only business of the government, is to take care that no man may live idle.’ ‘And the guilty thieves of Europe, the ...”

“... novel’. There was the ‘old narrative method’, the traditional tale, represented by H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett and Compton Mackenzie. At the other end of this contemporary spectrum there was the ‘dangerous’ Dostoevskian novel in which the writer has what Eliot calls ‘the gift, a sign of genius in itself, for utilising his ...”

“... Kasarda’s characterisation of globalised trade and production as a ‘smiley curve’, where the high value is added in the dimples at either end – the conception of the iPod in California, its marketing and sale on a cloned British high street – and the lesser value accrued in the dip in between by its physical ...”

“... the four, the kali yuga, which is presided over by the demon Kali, a foul-smelling monster with a huge tongue (not to be confused with the goddess Kali). Humanity in the kali yuga is characterised in the Mahabharata as dishonest, greedy, irreligious, intolerant, physically weak, obsessed with sex, and addicted to drink and drugs: as we are, basically. We are ...”

“... proper to “reconstitute” a Jewish state which has not existed for two thousand years,’ H.G. Wells once remarked, ‘why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.’ The modern Palestinians are a people of various ethnic origins, descended from the conquerors of Palestine ...”

“... than radicals, of multiculturalism as opposed to universalism, of mass culture as opposed to high culture, and of Post-Modernist aestheticism as opposed to a non-ironic concept of truth. The book is also a plea for the lonely intellectual, unswayed by the demands of the academic marketplace, who has been reviled by populists of the left and right, a plea ...”

“... Near the end​ of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller finds himself on a desolate beach in the distant future. Under a lurid red sky, by a slack, oily sea, he is set upon by giant crabs, last survivors in a dying world – ‘foul, slow-stirring monsters’, with ‘vast, ungainly claws smeared with an algal slime ...”

“... In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells’s Martians had the good sense to make landfall near Woking. ‘Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after, about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night.’ Technologically primitive Surrey suburbanites were zapped by future war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest ...”