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“... as packed with ideas and argumentative passages as the ‘prig novels’ of Samuel Butler and H.G. Wells. Although Byatt herself attended Cambridge, there is a feeling of thesis-illustration and slightly strained invention in Frederica’s adventures there. One sees it in the names of the luminaries who gather around her, names such as Raphael Faber (compare ...”

“... excess was to bind together the community of itching nonconformists. In Anticipations (1902), H.G. Wells contemplated with equanimity the likely disappearance of a number of institutions Kipling might have been thought to cherish, including ‘permanent monogamous marriage’. But he also waxed sardonic on the subject of cavalry generals of the old school, and ...”

“... which is the novel’s driving conceit, is plainly impossible, which is the point: like H.G. Wells in The Invisible Man or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Miéville takes an impossible proposition and works through its implications with rigour. At some moments the novel resembles a thought-experiment in semiotics, except that it’s at least as interested ...”

“... that Blériot was more popular than Napoleon. The Channel had not yet been conquered when H.G. Wells published his lurid The War in the Air, which had German Zeppelin-style dirigibles attacking the American fleet and raining bombs on New York; and, since Wells subscribed to the Yellow Peril, it also had a German airship ...”

“... will be available for use and the universe will grind to a halt. In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells evoked this grim prospect. As his travellers approach the far distant future, ‘the darkness grew apace … All the sounds of man … the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.’In the 1940s, Claude Shannon – an American ...”

“... In the 1920s he fought a six-year feud, and expended 100,000 words, in an attempt to deflate H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, which brushed aside Christianity and held that scientific progress was all. Next came a vicious dispute over the falsification of history with Professor G.G. Coulton, of whom it was remarked that ‘the law of correspondence with Dr ...”

“... visits of the supernatural stories on which Paget was working intermittently. Paget herself had no high regard for them: Gothic stories were in fashion; for her, they were light relief from a life dedicated to intellectual endeavour. Her more serious work remains, for good reason, neglected, but the best of the ghost stories have remained in print. Richly ...”

“... stirring at the next station, South Kensington, where, as Kate knows, he would normally alight. By High Street Kensington, he has taken the seat opposite; by Notting Hill Gate, he is at her elbow. ‘The extraordinary part of the matter,’ James observes, ‘was that they were not in the least meeting where they had left off, but ever so much further on, and ...”

“... His science fiction is not visionary but gamesome. It has more in common with Nintendo than H.G. Wells or Hugo Gernsback. But Banks does not (like the cyberpunk William Gibson) mock the great traditions of the genre; there are moments when Against a Dark Background, for instance, recalls the kitsch utopianism of Asimov’s ...”

“... the reconstruction (now known to be mistaken) of Neanderthals as stooped and shuffling. Thus H.G. Wells cast them, in The Grisly Folk, as troglodytic trollops racially distinct from modern people, who are tall, erect and white. Today Jean Auel’s novel The Clan of the Cave Bear tells the story of a young girl of anatomically ‘Modern’ stock (in other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in particular,’ adding that she had never had ‘so few invitations as this season’. H.G. Wells, for example, is said to have become remarkably cool towards them, although he had co-operated most warmly in the foundation of the Fabian Society a few years earlier. Was this change of attitude on the part of their former friends due to their growing ...”

“... of Thomas Mann’s coolness! Toomey’s real-life colleagues in the arts get a bad press. H.G. Wells is ‘a satyromaniac’, Ford Madox Ford has bad breath and a dirty mind, Norman Douglas is ‘filthy’ and ‘boy shagging’, T.S. Eliot is wrong about the Tarot pack and also (in which case, among many others) about Seneca’s act-division (‘there was ...”

“... administrator: a cool and rational mind, which commanded the admiration of Beatrice Webb and H.G. Wells, clear-cut goals, and strong reserves of determination. He was the most effective Irish Secretary of the 19th century. He forced through the great Education Act of 1902 and established the Committee of Imperial Defence. A supporter of Zionism, he proclaimed ...”

“... being closed. ‘Does God Exist? Aurora Library. No more questions, Aurora, darling! Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Hell’s not miserable. Madame Bovary. One less ovary!’ The books resist being consumed, releasing a viscous, sickening smoke. They are like creatures – ‘he saw it suddenly fan out its fresh pollack’s red gills’; ‘a cluster of ...”