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“... 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 ...”

“... This is Alasdair Gray’s funniest novel, his most high-spirited, and his least uneven. All of which does not necessarily make it his best, but certainly means that we have a nice surprise on our hands when you consider that Gray has spent much of the last few years publicly and gloomily announcing the death of his fictional imagination ...”

“... what you might expect from a man who had been reading novelists like Booth Tarkington and H.G. Wells. But Wilson respected Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent should feel. The Great War soon parted and changed them. Wilson went to France to work in a military hospital close to Verdun, where he learned to line up bodies on ...”

“... Fred Fairly, junior fellow of St Angelicus, is one of the cyclists on Mill Road. If H.G. Wells had not used the title already for a story on a similar theme, the book could have been called The Wheels of Chance. Fred’s life had taken a turn three weeks before when, cycling at dusk, this time along the Guestingley Road, he had an accident in which ...”

“... M & S quote and savage is the remark, which they ascribe to ‘a book reviewer’, that H.G. Wells can ‘exert his magnetism on the small boy in all of us’. The ‘solution’ M & S propose in that instance is to replace ‘small boy’ by ‘child’. Most of their ‘solutions’ have the same depressive effect of sucking the imaginative content out ...”

“... quickly off the mark. In no time she was holding lengthy conversations with Maurice Baring, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; interviewing Hilaire Belloc at King’s Land; visiting – she records – ‘ “Father Brown” among his Yorkshire moors’; going to Paris to see one old friend of Chesterton’s and to Indiana to see others; even contriving to gather ...”

“... At the time, he was being an aesthete in a room at Magdalen decorated in Paterian style, with a huge print of the Mona Lisa over the mantelpiece. Introduced by ‘Sligger’ Urquhart (prototype of Powell’s busy don, Sillery) to the more intellectual atmosphere of Balliol, he met Logan Pearsall-Smith, author of Trivia. The great man read an essay by ...”

“... school friend has married a famous writer and lives in Surrey. Hypo Wilson (famously based on H.G. Wells), with whom Miriam has an awkward love affair, urges her to write, either ‘middles’ for magazines or ‘the confessions of a modern woman’: suggestions which she scorns, and which Dorothy Richardson took up. Another friend is the Russian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... intricacies and contradictions. Europe, it seemed to many in 1914, was due for a shake-up. H.G. Wells, whose apocalyptic War in the Air was published in 1908, was not alone in dreaming up a major new conflict. Two years earlier, the Daily Mail had serialised a novel about a German invasion by the journalist William Le Queux; his 1894 book, The Great War in ...”

“... permanent settlements for unemployed families. He lost the political argument but won the moral high ground. He did so again in 1921, when, as Mayor of Poplar, he led a rates rebellion, refusing either to reduce the level of relief paid to the unemployed or to set a higher rate. Lansbury and his fellow councillors were summonsed to the ...”

“... of Anne Frank. The stylistic challenge of the tale of the future was defined long ago by H.G. Wells. It is the challenge of knowing when to be vague and when to be precise. ‘So soon as the hypothesis has been launched,’ Wells said of his scientific romances, ‘the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at ...”

“... quest into the origins of the conservationist mentality, he traced it to a variety of sources both high and low, famous and obscure. He inquired into the history of the National Trust and the National Heritage Memorial Fund. He researched the history of the Shell oil company’s remarkable campaign, begun in the Twenties, to popularise the countryside. He cast ...”

“... velveteen all day. I wore it only in the evening.’ Beneath the velveteen was venom. When H.G. Wells tried to propel the Fabians towards more vigorous political action there was a row with the Blands. When Wells was intercepted with Bland’s daughter Rosamund at Paddington Station, en route for the Continent, there was ...”

“... years. Success eluded him during his lifetime, although some prescient fellow writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid and H.G. Wells, had marked him as a major talent. Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless North-Eastern coastal region that ...”