Search Results

“... recognition that it is as impressive ‘in its way and for its date’ as that of Chartres and Wells. But to dispel the prejudice those qualifications need explanation, and more sympathy should be permitted expression. On the whole, however, he is right in the strategy he has adopted, which is simply to put us in a position where we are bound to question ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... Carlos Williams’s ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’. And you may say that his luck holds: for Robert Green is also an admirer, but his book is thoroughly sensible, unbedazzled and discriminating, the book of someone who has heard of other writers and is in no kind of ‘Special relationship’ to Ford. What he has set out to do, and it is a wise ...”

“... on the Kinetoscope in 1895 by combining camera and projector in their Cinématographe. In Britain Robert Paul produced his own camera and projector when Edison 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 ...”

“... novels. Forster’s view of the celebrated and painful disagreement between James and H.G. Wells is expressed in Aspects of the Novel; he seems pleased rather than sympathetic to see James ridiculed, and even joins in the teasing. He firmly awards the judgment to Wells, a disquieting conclusion if you remember the ...”

“... thrilled. It was all coming together. Fortuities: in 1943, when Ashbery was 15, Margaret Hubbell Wells, a neighbour and family friend, wrote to Frank Boyden, the headmaster of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, a legendary figure in 20th-century American secondary education. Wells’s two older sons had attended Deerfield ...”

“... a minority has always spurned the past. The past intimidates, threatens and diminishes us. For Robert Browning’s ‘Paracelsus’, it was written on a ‘sullen page’. The past is regarded as a brake on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed ...”

“... permission but local staff would occasionally try to interfere as he went at the oil wells with fire, dynamite and his personal sledgehammer. If the force of his personality failed to get them to back off, Daniel Yergin writes in The Prize, ‘he would deliver a powerful kick or pull out his revolver and shout: “I don’t speak your blasted ...”

“... producers, CBS, who had to apologise to listeners, the Federal Communications Commission and H.G. Wells, all of whom appeared shocked. CBS made Welles apologise too and settled out-of-court claims for injuries received by panicking listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the ...”

“... neighbours. Nevertheless East Europeans are apt to marvel, Miranda-like, at their brave new world. Robert Darnton interviewed, among others, Reinhard Becker, the local councillor responsible for the environment in Bitterfeld, East Germany – surely the most thankless municipal job in Europe. When Becker visited his West German twin town he was ...”

“... to Evelyn Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as ...”

“... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...”

“... and Dudley Nichols’s idea of making Thieves like Us was taken up by Nicholas Ray in 1948 and by Robert Altman in 1974. All these stories, of course, were originally novels written by someone else, but we do get a sense that in Hollywood this process is less like recycling and more like playing a jazz standard, done with a certain amount of respect, or a ...”

“... More, Campanella, Bacon, Rousseau, Mercier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Owen, Fourier, Morris, Bellamy, Wells, Skinner – and some unexpected alternatives – Dickens (oddly represented by a diatribe against the idea of the Noble Savage), Tennyson, Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats – Carey presents a wonderfully rich array of obscure writers from many cultures ...”

“... He died, in 1928, experimenting on himself with blood donations from an infected patient. Like Wells’s vampiric Martians, Bogdanov’s aliens in Red Star are interested in blood – but only as something to be shared among themselves, in semi-religious ‘comradely exchanges of life’. A scientific amateur and Socialist philosopher, Bogdanov developed a ...”