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“... first sight, the most reflective thing about The Dragon in the Sword is its narcissism. Its hero John Daker, alias Flamadin, has lost his memory. This is convenient, because it enables people to be awe-stricken by his presence while he remains no more than modestly gratified. He can also rediscover his own superhuman qualities with pleasing freshness. As ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... refused to supply him with films. Paul also patented a design for a time machine based on H.G. Wells’s short story, in which a series of moving platforms would ‘transport’ an audience to different periods with the help of images projected on a screen and a ‘conductor’ who would lead them back to the present day (he never actually built the ...”

“... one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s fight with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a ...”

“... by a new editor. De Quincey came to see that it was Edinburgh where he had to make his mark, with John Wilson, editor of Blackwood’s, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, and de Quincey’s contact and pal. (In his study of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, John Gross describes Wilson as ‘a pest’.) De ...”

“... be entirely happy to pay to subscribe to Anthony Lane on movies in the New Yorker, and Patricia Wells on restaurants in the Herald Tribune, and Larry Elliott on economics in the Guardian, and David Pogue on technology in the New York Times, and I also want to feel free to read anything else which catches my eye, whenever I feel like it – I just don’t ...”

“... what you might expect from a man who had been reading novelists like Booth Tarkington and H.G. Wells. But Wilson respected Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent should feel. The Great War soon parted and changed them. Wilson went to France to work in a military hospital close to Verdun, where he learned to line up bodies on ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... from an ancient Egyptian aristocratic family, that they had a fleet of liners, that they owned oil wells and the Rockefeller Plaza and had hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of construction work on order from one of Britain’s top builders, Sunley. John MacArthur, a senior director of Kleinwort Benson, told millions of ...”

“... proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their clothes are more interesting. It ...”

“... Before Sir John Deodoran, Magus of the Scrolls, Lord Justice Clam and Lord Justice Null. Law Reporter: E.P. Thompson The Court of Appeal enforced circumlocutory injunctions restraining the Fourth Estate from publishing whatever any judge had injuncted, whether it had already been universally published or no. The greater part of the submissions were heard in camera and the Court injuncted publication of the terms of the injunctions ...”

“... that expresses itself in the twisting and hammering of poetic form. Among recent poets, John Berryman comes to mind as the ideally mischievous, ideally anguished translator of Corbière. But Pilling has done the great service of putting back into general circulation a number of long-lost pieces. This volume represents the whole of Les Amours jaunes ...”

“... extinct – civilisation, a myth that underwrote popular fancy and science fiction from H.G. Wells onwards. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles of 1951, which as an adolescent in the 1950s I knew as The Silver Locusts, combined this idea with that of Mars as a frontier planet soon to be colonised and revivified. Set between January 1999 and October ...”

“... for Nationalism in Scotland, to fight against the left – as it would have been in the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Association. Over the next two decades the party’s programme was utterly transformed. Salmond was, of course, responsible for implementing these changes, but the initial plan was laid out by Maxwell, whose influential pamphlet from 1981, The ...”

“... Texas, and the recovery of not quite human bodies from the wreckage – and in which a young H.G. Wells forged the myths and obsessions of modern sci-fi. In Carlson’s eyes, Tesla’s relationship with modernity in all its forms – its fixation with progress and explanation, capital and connection, but also its fragmentation of narrative and the self – is ...”