“... on the ‘normatively-binding theory of intersubjective communication’ which he offered in his huge Theory of Communicative Action. On his view, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault are ‘symptoms of exhaustion’ – the exhaustion of ‘the philosophy of consciousness’. Habermas may be the best critic these philosophers have yet had – the most ...”

“... now passing, that spoke it.’ Of course, there are crudities of thought and argument. If high literature is so often arguing against itself, or written by people who do not come from the polished upper classes, then at what point should one stop making such a petit-bourgeois fuss about its ‘literariness’ and simply concede that it is not so ...”

“... and prose of the rebel leaders were widely circulated among a sympathetic American audience, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett published essays critical of them in the United States. The poets’ crazy dream was to be countered by some of the leading practitioners of modern English prose.’ I realise when I read this passage that if I had a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and had instead enthusiastically embraced a resurgent federal Europe? What if Britain had devoted huge resources to help reconstruct a still radioactive Soviet Union and formed a peaceful Atlantic-to-the-Urals ‘Eurovision’ partnership ranged against the rampant and dangerous American superpower? What if America, as the world’s sole nuclear state, was ...”

“... at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual commitments, but – also ...”

“... of a cyclist as (say) an emblem of arid intellectualism or modern egotism or something else H.G. Wells thought a good thing. ‘Don’t ask me to define the soul,’ Lawrence protested in Fantasia of the Unconscious: ‘You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who so whimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad.’ Yuck. It ...”

“... chloroform and carbon disulphide. Alex’s new school, true to its subtitle the ‘Glasgow High School of Science’, taught maths, physics and chemistry: Greek had been abolished from the curriculum by the will of the founder. Allan Glen’s School nourished the interest that had begun with his home chemistry set. Todd had no difficulties with regular ...”

“... the king-killer. Between the publication years of these volumes, Horne Tooke was prosecuted for high treason, along with Orator Thelwall. As E.P. Thompson remarks, if they had been convicted, they could have been hanged, drawn and quartered (passive participles, again): but ‘a Grand Jury of London citizens had no stomach for this,’ declares Thompson, in ...”

“... of the most prominent members of the intelligentsia to deliver talks – Keynes, Shaw, Woolf, H.G. Wells – and was responsible for much of the characteristic tone and content of British radio. Matheson and Reith had a difficult relationship. In 1931, he refused her permission to put Harold Nicolson on air to discuss Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but ...”

“... an upgrade on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. (She opted for Dorothy Richardson and H.G. Wells for the epigraphs to her second diary book, An Experiment in Leisure, on ‘what to do with one’s spare time’, published three years later.) The Woolf Milner quotes in the diary is not A Room of One’s Own but her essay on Montaigne, with its ...”

“... when she said yes. John Middleton Murry saw that when Lawrence went to a party given by H.G. Wells in 1914, it was with sickly determination that Lawrence insisted on evening dress. ‘Now Lawrence,’ wrote Murry, ‘who looked his lithe and limber self in many kinds of attire, did not resemble himself at all when locked into a dress-suit ... But ...”

“... not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. Kafka When H.G. Wells accused Henry James of having sacrificed his life to art James replied, with characteristically artful indignation: ‘I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it might be, is in my own kind of expression of that. Art makes ...”

“... she wanted to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s ...”

“... in the ‘Imperial theme’, the theme of timeless empire continually renewing itself over huge tracts of history by means of ‘translations’ and ‘renovations’. This imperium sine fine was seen by Kermode as a paradigm of the ‘classic’ – that is to say, of that notion of a literary model or measure binding on all European cultures. In his ...”