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“... 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 ...”

“... Ford, Ezra Pound (who apparently had a habit of playing her piano with his nose when drunk), H.G. Wells and E. Nesbit, who, Weldon’s grandmother tells her, ‘was very excitable and . . . ran round the corridors at night screaming’. Meanwhile, Weldon attends a Scottish-influenced girls’ high school, reads Tolkien and Raymond Chandler and, on being told ...”

“... of the cultural magazine Scottish International; and the Scots Fanonites Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull would apply Fanon’s insights about an internalised sense of inferiority to Scotland’s cravenly sub-metropolitan lettered classes (I was among those named and shamed).The unbending realities of first past the post politics crushed the SLP’s ...”

“... model of our own. I believe the only two others who have won this double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of writing any such ...”

“... the ithyphallic poet. This argument, initially so appealing, collapsed under scrutiny. Stanley Wells observed that Forman’s manuscript read ‘brave’ not ‘brown’, John Carey crisply noted that, if Emilia was Italian, Rosaline was French, and Mary Edmond established the true name of Lanier’s husband: Alfonso. In the new text only ‘Will in ...”

“... cleansing, in which some of the men refused to take part. Animals were slaughtered and thrown into wells to poison the water. Homes were burnt down. Prisoners were lined up on the bank of a ditch and shot. I took the book with me to Mogadishu, Somalia, and found that reading a chapter of summary soldiering in My Lai was a busman’s holiday after a day of ...”

“... of The Tea-Shop, 1929, one of Burra’s Naughtee Paree numbers, perfect for a Folio Society Ronald Firbank reprint, makes it to the dust jacket.) Pictures, it’s true, might distract from the commissioned narrative and, anyway, biographers of painters should avoid frisking pictures for personal disclosures. Yet of all 20th-century British ...”

“... seniority and free to tack further right.‘In a strange way,’ he said, ‘the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me … has been going for for the past few years.’ His own campaign for president, in 1988, was a dress rehearsal for the Third Way politics that would send Bill Clinton to the White ...”

“... SF is the tradition originating not in Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein but rather in H.G. Wells’s technological prognostications. The Hard SF tradition likes Jules Verne, the predictor of submarines and holograms, but frowns at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF ...”

“... England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.   Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of cloud. I let him have it, and I think I must have got him in the wing because he ...”

“... the station clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ‘Utopia’. He read Shaw, Wells and Russell, and stopped saluting the laird (but not the doctor, the minister or the teacher) because he ‘contributed nothing to the community’ and wasn’t very intelligent: ‘There’s naething in him except what he puts in with a spoon.’ By ...”

“... supplications, administers the strap. Tearful Jakie runs away even as his father’s prayer wells up on the soundtrack. A decade or more passes. In a studio reconstruction of Coffee Dan’s, San Francisco show business hang-out of the era, Jolson makes his first appearance as the mature Jakie, now known as Jack Robin. The entire scene is redolent of his ...”

“... by Parliament for the liberties it claimed to defend. A similarly dispiriting picture emerges from Ronald Hutton’s excellent essay ‘The Royalist War Effort’, which bears some striking resemblances to his excellent book The Royalist War Effort: somehow the trailer has appeared after the film. These essays are mostly about the victims rather than the ...”

“... death. Dyson’s book enters the fray over who gets to speak for the icon of Martin Luther King. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed not only the civil rights movement but also the national legislation ending legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national holiday. There ...”

“... not allegory.5 September, Mells. I knew about Mells from reading Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox and from all the First World War stuff which comes at the end of the first act of Forty Years On. The church closes off a short street of terraced houses which wouldn’t be remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like ...”