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“... extinct – civilisation, a myth that underwrote popular fancy and science fiction from H.G. Wells onwards. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles of 1951, which as an adolescent in the 1950s I knew as The Silver Locusts, combined this idea with that of Mars as a frontier planet soon to be colonised and revivified. Set between January 1999 and October ...”

“... you can rely on being told that she was displaying ‘qualities that must have once made H.G. Wells wonder what he had gotten into’. There is in this book too much snide misrepresentation and sheer error to report in detail, but most of it pales beside the dottiness of his idea that the Chatterley trial showed ‘literature’s lack of any theoretical ...”

“... reproduction of a veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tyres’. H.G. Wells, at the start of the cycling craze, was quick to recognise the liberating possibilities of this new technology. In The Wheels of Chance, a draper’s assistant uses his annual holiday to take to the roads of Surrey and Sussex, where he encounters a young ...”

“... socialism had an emotional, almost religious basis lacking in that of the Webbs or, later, H.G. Wells. In his Fabian essay on property, Wallas describes the ‘dreary squalor’ of the English industrial working class, then the new and nobler life socialism could bring them. ‘Socialism hangs above them as the crown hung in Bunyan’s story above the man ...”

“... novels Snooty Baronet, The Revenge for Love and The Vulgar Streak. Explaining the last to H.G. Wells, Lewis claimed his own kind of up-to-dateness: ‘the doctrine by Mussolini from Les Réflexions sur la Violence and from Nietzsche (who got his stuff fundamentally from Darwin) – this doctrine taken over by Hitler and influencing so many minds in Europe ...”

“... learned, clever, efficient, schoolboyish, sportsmanlike. Tap might have been a hero for an H.G. Wells story, while Bertie belongs rather to Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. They were members of the ruling class: they knew how to perform that function and play that role. Any granddaughter could be proud of Bertie and Tap. But eventually Bertie’s dim ...”

“... wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so slightly asymmetrical and as ...”

“... Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Unless clearly backed by an important publishing house or journal, as with Victor Gollancz or Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman, or an actual mass organisation like Lord Robert Cecil’s League of Nations Union or Canon ...”

“... Son, 1848). Soon those particles would be so visible, so septum-grating that the occupants of the high-bourgeois palaces of Tyburnia and of the Ladbroke, Grosvenor and Cadogan estates would leave for more distant suburbs, abandoning their demesnes to dereliction, piggeries and potteries, slum landlords, multiple occupancy, the higher delinquency, drugs and ...”

“... politicians on both sides of the House, writers and intellectuals (Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), trade-unionists, bankers and that uncategorisable original, Lady Astor. ‘An ambassador without excellent personal contacts is not worthy of the name,’ Maisky wrote to Fedor Gusev, one of the ‘new men’ who came into the ...”

“... with Kipling’s narrowness and a host of other national failures. His highest praise for H.G. Wells is that ‘he has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.’ It’s not Chesterton’s fault that his idea should have become so popular with people who didn’t have to go to ...”

“... The book concludes with another informative chapter contrasting the career of H.G. Wells, who ‘remained essentially an Edwardian all his life’, with that of May Sinclair, whose concern with literary form and the representation of consciousness identifies her as a forerunner of Woolf and Richardson. Miller gives an illuminating account of ...”

“... but also innovative study in the new Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars ...”

“... the editing and publication of Thackeray’s letters (nor did he deliver a promised Life of H.G. Wells – whose archive he had acquired, at vast cost, for Urbana). It was left to Edgar Harden to bring out the supplementary two volumes of the letters in 1994, after Ray’s death. With Gordon Haight and Edgar Johnson, Ray belonged to the heroic age of ...”

“... The man who invented tomorrow, explored the making of a TV documentary about a famous writer, H.G. Wells. In The Pork Butcher it would not have been appropriate to explore the contrast between fiction and documentary explicitly or self-consciously. In fact, it would be absurd to suppose that every novel ought to be a metafiction or self-conscious novel. More ...”