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“... know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her inability to devise a winning Brexit strategy. But Osborne, never. He didn’t stand in the 2017 general election. The dilemma May faced was how to square the circle Brexit had conjured up: on the ...”

“... and abortion – and were in need of ‘protection’ (the theme of one chapter). H.G. Wells’s dreadful treatment of them, and his other moral inadequacies, are a running theme of the book, along with his warnings about class conflict. Periodically from the 1880s, and especially after 1910, trade union militancy became impossible to ...”

“... many of them held on Astor leases, the investment reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become ...”

“... 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 and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In Abinger Harvest E.M. Forster had the idea ...”

“... In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on Thackeray by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning of the naughty bits) and chose as ...”

“... magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ...”

“... the ithyphallic poet. This argument, initially so appealing, collapsed under scrutiny. Stanley Wells observed that Forman’s manuscript read ‘brave’ not ‘brown’, John Carey crisply noted that, if Emilia was Italian, Rosaline was French, and Mary Edmond established the true name of Lanier’s husband: Alfonso. In the new text only ‘Will in ...”

“... these have included £78 million to the Royal Opera House, £30 million to Sadler’s Wells dance company, £13 million to buy the Churchill Papers.’ Luvvies obsessed with ‘the arts’ and ‘old buildings’ spend the people’s money, which should be going to ‘recognised charities and medical research’ – for the Sun the Millennium ...”

“... him that he was afraid to write. ‘Of what am I afraid?’ Sheridan asked. ‘You are afraid,’ Michael Kelly replied, ‘of the author of The School for Scandal.’ It is the kind of thing that people say to writers who have stopped writing and chosen to do something more immediately practical in the world. Chedzoy quotes the London Evening Post of 8 May ...”

“... primed to scan his new novels for glimpses of earlier characters. Brooklyn features a vignette of Michael Redmond, the schoolteacher father of Eamon in The Heather Blazing. There is also a reference to Eamon himself: ‘He’s studying, I’d say. That’s what he usually does.’ Later in the novel, we recognise yet another character from The Heather ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”

“... bride and groom were ‘the most frightful cripples, degraded paupers and lamentable ne’er-do-wells as were in the district’.The structure​ of the flu virus was first seen in 1943, when effective electron microscopes became available. They are just 0.1 microns across, between a tenth and a twentieth of the size of the bacilli most often associated ...”

“... many of them trivial or inappropriate, and it is surely fair to ask whether ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells’, for example, has any reason to be angry at all. The Latin proverb, Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas, ‘Jupiter, you are angry; therefore you are wrong,’ has some currency as a putdown in 19th-century Russian literature, and Rudin comes out with it in the ...”

“... By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former fanzine which the editor, John Carnell, had managed to keep sporadically in print – was purchased by the trade publishing firm Maclaren’s and began coming out monthly ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the coup ...”