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“... not always respectable) riches, who found an admirer in Edward VII and an outspoken critic in H.G. Wells. Faced with such varied material, Aslet sorts his houses into two basic types: the social and the romantic. The social house was built on the grandest of scales for the richest of the rich: some patricians, most parvenus. Smart, glossy, luxurious and ...”

“... lives’. She had no humour exactly, but both she and Lawrence had a great instinct for the high comic-grotesque, in their own and others’ lives – a sense both Dostoevskian and Germanic. It must have made them roar when her husband’s sister Maude compared her to the Titanic (which had just gone down), not seeing the mischief she did any more than ...”

“... women in the home. Some thought that motherhood should be remunerated, Eleanor Rathbone and H.G. Wells among them – but was this not tantamount, others asked, to treating women like paid servants or even prostitutes? Freedom from the home, the more radical argued, was freedom to make a life for one’s self, and to love out of desire rather than the need ...”

“... John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending him a copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed it to ‘Oxford’s only civilising influence’. To those who, in 1931, goggled and giggled at his innkeeping confessions, Fothergill was the contumacious dandy for ever locked in combat with ‘clients’ who fell short of his standards, a man prepared to track down and rebuke a brigadier-general who, with his wife, dropped in to the Spreadeagle to use the lavatory without a please or thank you ...”

“... was not reciprocated because his contemporaries were not able to understand his great vision.’ High-level suicide was a Viennese preoccupation at the turn of the century – as witness the deaths of the royal lovers at Mayerling, and those of the brothers of both Mahler and Wittgenstein. Indeed, Wittgenstein himself had contemplated studying under ...”

“... of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s ...”

“... hostesses like Lady St Helier, and grandes dames like Violet Hunt, a former mistress of H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. He now established himself as a prolific writer of novels, short stories and plays, and perfected his public persona: polite but cynical, with a streak of cruelty. He told a story of meeting Churchill at a house party, when Churchill ...”

“... I think, first brought to public attention by David Caute in The Fellow Travellers (1973), then by Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never secret, being set out in Ransome’s own articles for the ...”

“... to hardworking silence.’ Even the use of the word ‘nipple’ was controversial in 1938; H.G. Wells reported that the book made him feel as though he’d been ‘thrown into a washing basket full of used nursery napkins’, though his tone seems closer to mock outrage than to the real thing. The image of the squire’s baby falling asleep immediately ...”

“... Imagist poetry, the rise of Russian studies, detective fiction, the League of Nations. Her aim is high: she argues that taken together these lives suggest a new way of looking at the mid-20th century.Square Haunting goes on the blink every now and then, losing its focus and unravelling into a series of lively, but separate, crammed essays. Yet at the centre ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had created something of a splash in 1869 with his Hereditary Genius, purporting to correlate high achievement with particular bloodlines. In work by others inspired by Galton’s example, the easily transmitted cultural advantages of a social elite were sometimes mistaken for manifestations of biological heredity. In the early decades of the 20th century ...”

“... a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound (1927). The son of immigrant Jews in the East End, he was a conscientious objector when he met Butts, who was working for an anti-conscription organisation. They married two years later, had a daughter named ...”

“... his early years in London he worked as a tutor to the sons of upper-middle-class families, earning high praise for the inventiveness and patience of his methods. He never gave up his efforts to encourage his younger siblings to share his love of the classical and modern works that he found – in his favourite youthful adjective – ‘glorious’. Some of the ...”

“... reality is superseded by the imperious further reality of first one dream, then another. A broad high-road is covered with liquid mud through which people trudge with wallets on their backs. After a brief moment of wakefulness, Varka dreams the death of her father, rolling on the floor because ‘his guts had burst’ – and the way she felt for ‘the ...”