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“... By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines ...”

“... Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as though seen through the wrong reading glasses). Macmillan’s accountants must be relying on the book selling in large quantities and over a long period in order to recoup their ...”

“... with the ‘time of old sin’ – whether a fantastical Alma-Tadema-ish Ancient Rome, or a John Addington Symonds Athens, where pederasty was not merely permissible but praiseworthy – drifted, for those who survived their heady youth of Baudelaire and absinthe, into the Aesthetes’ religion, in which chalices and smoke played their part. ...”

“... of any literary stature were only too aware of the tradition of publishing correspondence. John Evelyn, for example, arranged his manuscript letter books to resemble a collection on the classical model. The privacy of the letter was a vexed issue. Once cast into the mailbag it was lost to the sender but might never arrive: ‘I am very uneasy about the ...”

“... wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I went to see every programme and made notes of what I could remember, while waiting at Didcot on successive evenings for the last train home. By the time I went to New York in 1989, I was fully aware that I ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... Williams went round New England collecting plant specimens, plunging thermometers into deep-water wells and tracking the migratory patterns of birds, in order to confirm his theory that the arrival of Christianity and industry on the continent had induced a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read ...”

“... one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is Puritanism: America has seen to that. But not the ordinary mainstream history of the Jacobean Church. We still tend to see that history through Victorian eyes, our understanding of early Stuart ...”

“... Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original works of its kind, a detailed and sensitive rescuing of its subject from the Victorian silence that entombed him. In writing about Symonds, historian of the Renaissance, Ms Grosskurth ...”

“... and abortion – and were in need of ‘protection’ (the theme of one chapter). H.G. Wells’s dreadful treatment of them, and his other moral inadequacies, are a running theme of the book, along with his warnings about class conflict. Periodically from the 1880s, and especially after 1910, trade union militancy became impossible to ...”

“... Glass happened on her lab specimens – who did have the means.Prospecting a hundred years, H.G. Wells wrote: ‘The London citizen of the year 2000 AD may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”

“... he appears before me, I could not stop myself kissing him.’ Unlike his tight-fisted father, King John, Henry was generous to a fault, showering all around him with precious rings, brooches, luxurious robes, huge consignments of firewood and deer from his forests. The gifts he received from others he regifted, also on a heroic scale. When he ran out of cash ...”

“... as a routine or mannerism goes back a long way in Heaney (to those early poems about digging and wells, which double as allegories of writing), and it does not vanish in such theoretically wised-up poems as ‘Alphabets’ in The Haw Lantern, however restrained the poet’s verbal palette had meanwhile become. As a result, the charge that he wasn’t saying ...”