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“... planners feel the place has suffered enough. The worst eyesore is the Europa Hotel, a charmless tower block with precisely the air of prawn-cocktail-and-Mateus-rosé sophistication that the name suggests. For this, the stately GNR terminus was sacrificed. But the Crown Liquor Saloon opposite, the San Marco of pubs, is not only still there but protected by ...”

“... in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With all these perils, real or imaginary, and with H.G. Wells raising the spectre of Martians invading England in The War of Worlds, who needed a Yellow Peril? In the vulgar view China was a degenerate nation which exported laundrymen to do the world’s dirty washing. If it posed any real threat it was as a source of ...”

“... polemic is surely the most ephemeral. His famous rumpuses with the likes of Shaw, Dean Inge, H.G. Wells and Co now seem dead, only enlivened – as in his marvellous ‘Chuck it, Smith’ verses addressed to F.E. Smith on the subject of Welsh Disestablishment – where the wit is so airy that he has absorbed the matter in question into his own fantasy ...”

“... of pipe from the drilling bit to the surface. The fact that the rigs stand as high as the Eiffel Tower on patches of mud and sand named after face-lifted American womanhood: Thelma, Terri, Beryl are the wives of oilmen. But perhaps Alvarez deserves credit for not ducking his mission as explainer. Few writers, or writers in the sense of literary guys, are ...”

“... to link Scotland and Ireland by tunnel. Instead, he conceived the idea of a gigantic viewing tower, higher than the Eiffel, at Wembley, already a proud stop on his line. Begun in the 1890s, Watkin’s Folly had reached only a fifth of its proposed height when the money ran out and it was pulled down in 1907. The site was fated to support triumphalist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Lichfield which was demolished, and Bath Cathedral Priory, a nominal cathedral in Bath and Wells, which looked more like, and became, a large parish church. Henry even elevated some former monasteries to be cathedrals for the first time: Westminster Abbey, Gloucester, Peterborough, Oxford, Bristol, Chester. This was the most substantial change to the ...”

“... deploy radioactive materials in their quest for oil. Nuclear probes are inserted into potential wells in order to determine whether they are suitable candidates for further exploration. These probes also happen to be the perfect size to use as the core of a dirty bomb. As a consequence, in all jurisdictions in which they are used they are heavily ...”

“... always refer to my essay on ‘Canon and Chronology’ as a set of page numbers in a book by ‘Wells et al’ – I am the intended target of a number of Barroll’s polemical asides, and hence am hardly a perfectly objective reviewer. In some cases Barroll has changed my mind: I think he provides (in Appendix Three) a good explanation for theatre closings ...”

“... initially any number of scales for measuring weather – Gustave Eiffel, for example, used his tower as the test site for an array of barometric and other climatic indices – but just as time was eventually standardised to meet the needs of the railroads and the telegraph, so the measurement of weather was gradually reduced to a few benchmark indices. One ...”

“... rather than in its more familiar idiom, the outspoken censoriousness of Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells. As one observer noted, May’s personal popularity in the months before her disastrous election campaign was an inexplicable ‘cult of no personality’. From Buckingham Palace rumours to European Commission leaks, it seems that everybody who dines with ...”

“... the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of ...”

“... Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some ...”

“... the island of Syra, Smyrna, Rhodes, Beyrout and Alexandria; from thence to Cairo, Suez, Moses’ Wells, &c. Then from Cairo he crossed the desert, to Jerusalem by way of El Arish, then to Jordan, the Dead Sea and Bethlehem; then from Jerusalem to Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Mount Carmel, Acre, Tyre, Sidon and Beyrout. From Beyrout he went to Tripoli, the ...”

“... on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were available to a single mother in a tower block. Note here: 1. the implicitly derogatory twist to ‘middle-class’ – no politician would ever dare to use ‘working-class’ in a sentence explaining why he was discounting people’s views; 2. that Reid’s little cameo ignores the rights of the ...”