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“... pips were the bulbs of its lower-deck lights. It was quiet but not soundless. It was like the H.G. Wells story in which time is slowed down until sounds disintegrate into separate beats. Cars revved somewhere; a lorry far over towards Shoreditch hooted. A distant alarm pulsed. Across a distance which could have been far or close came the tap of a stick, then a ...”

“... which subsequently turn out to be accurate. An Experiment seems kooky now, but H.G. Wells took an interest, and so did the Tolkien/Lewis Inklings, and J.B. Priestley, among others. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer and former soldier, and part of the appeal of his book was probably that he dressed his speculations with the correct amount of ...”

“... Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless books, articles and TV documentaries, it has also ...”

“... it a more authentically working-class flavour (shades of John Major?). A generation earlier, H.G. Wells grew up in a basement kitchen with a mother as discontented as Steedman’s and Woodward’s, a mother who abandoned the domestic hearth, and forced her younger son out into the world as a draper’s apprentice the moment she found an opportunity to become ...”

“... phaeton, like Cinderella, pulled by two Shetland ponies . . . complete with coachman perched on high behind . . . Best of all, she was regularly piloted down the Avon in her own gondola, named The Dream. This vehicle was specially imported from Venice complete with gondolier, until the Latin’s quarrelsome inebriation compelled his replacement by her ...”

“... his most recent novel, A Man of Parts (2011), a fictional treatment of the life and loves of H.G. Wells. He has also, not coincidentally, long been a keen Jamesian, devoting an acute chapter to The Ambassadors in Language of Fiction, and later attempting a fictionalising of James’s life in his novel Author, Author (2004). Whatever else we might expect of ...”

“... students and Linson’s artist friends in New York, literary figures like Willa Cather and H.G. Wells, and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no ...”

“... He was firmly unboastful, but felt it all right to praise a technique; there was a flavour of H.G. Wells. Asked whether he had slept in an igloo, he said: ‘Of course; those were the only comfortable nights we spent in Alaska.’ It was only to explain how easy the thing is, once you know the trick, that he recalled what can surely not be a standard bit of ...”

“... There are moments in his diaries when the utopian strain surfaces like one of the dreams of H.G. Wells. Even in the middle of the First World War Amery could imagine a self-sufficient Empire immune from the troubles of Europe. In May 1915 he wrote to Milner: ‘All this harping on Prussian militarism as something that must be rooted out, as itself criminal ...”

“... Bobby walked back unless it was raining. He disliked being observed, however remotely. He had a high fence so that I could not look over into his garden and the back windows of his house were heavily curtained. He was a considerable artist, usually with Sarah as his subject. He occasionally painted his son John, but there was not much love lost between ...”

“... August Bebel’s phrase ‘the socialism of fools’ as a blanket term for the ideas of Shaw and Wells. Bebel’s concern was to attack the kind of socialism, typified in a British context by H.M. Hyndman, which involved the mobilising of anti-semitic prejudices under the guise of attacking capitalist plutocracy. It is, however, with Arnoldian ...”

“... its worst approaches the vulgarity of the gossip-column. Does it illuminate the Utopianism of H.G. Wells to write of him: ‘As he jumped from bed to bed in his personal life, he preached of a new order’? Two ‘throw-away’ phrases illuminate the Manuels’ method: ‘the muck of scholarly analysis’ and ‘the windy exposition of an abstract ...”

“... house in Warwick Gardens,’ he began, ‘and turn to the left, I find myself in what is called High St, Kensington. It is not high, it is quite flat, and it is a long way from Kensington, three reasons why it should not bear that name. It has, however, a distinguishing peculiarity. There are seven tobacconists, each of ...”

“... and the answer is another 20 years of imperfectly edited (or unedited) Orwell, Greene, Eliot, Wells and any other canonical author who died after 1925. The proposed reform is particularly tantalising for scholars like Patrick Parrinder, who has been working for some years on a revised team-edition of H.G. Wells (died ...”

“... this is ‘an alternative, Jewish history of our times’. ‘History’ is not quite accurate. A huge quantity of press-cuttings have been fed into its pages, but they are mere grist to Selbourne’s meditative mill. What he aims to do is tell us the meaning of our times by placing them in a self-consciously Hebraic perspective. The Christians and (more ...”