“... Kasarda’s characterisation of globalised trade and production as a ‘smiley curve’, where the high value is added in the dimples at either end – the conception of the iPod in California, its marketing and sale on a cloned British high street – and the lesser value accrued in the dip in between by its physical ...”

“... the four, the kali yuga, which is presided over by the demon Kali, a foul-smelling monster with a huge tongue (not to be confused with the goddess Kali). Humanity in the kali yuga is characterised in the Mahabharata as dishonest, greedy, irreligious, intolerant, physically weak, obsessed with sex, and addicted to drink and drugs: as we are, basically. We are ...”

“... proper to “reconstitute” a Jewish state which has not existed for two thousand years,’ H.G. Wells once remarked, ‘why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.’ The modern Palestinians are a people of various ethnic origins, descended from the conquerors of Palestine ...”

“... than radicals, of multiculturalism as opposed to universalism, of mass culture as opposed to high culture, and of Post-Modernist aestheticism as opposed to a non-ironic concept of truth. The book is also a plea for the lonely intellectual, unswayed by the demands of the academic marketplace, who has been reviled by populists of the left and right, a plea ...”

“... refused to supply him with films. Paul also patented a design for a time machine based on H.G. Wells’s short story, in which a series of moving platforms would ‘transport’ an audience to different periods with the help of images projected on a screen and a ‘conductor’ who would lead them back to the present day (he never actually built the ...”

“... Near the end​ of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller finds himself on a desolate beach in the distant future. Under a lurid red sky, by a slack, oily sea, he is set upon by giant crabs, last survivors in a dying world – ‘foul, slow-stirring monsters’, with ‘vast, ungainly claws smeared with an algal slime ...”

“... In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells’s Martians had the good sense to make landfall near Woking. ‘Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after, about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night.’ Technologically primitive Surrey suburbanites were zapped by future war weaponry; it was a horribly unequal contest ...”

“... unresolved and gaily accepted’. Ian Thomson tells us that Levi also loved Azio Corghi’s high Modernist opera based on Gargantua that had its premiere in 1984. The atonal music did not interest him, but the spectacular special effects (a giant jet of the protagonist’s urine drenched the opera’s cast), the profanity that so offended neo-Fascist ...”

“... idea. He has had them before, but he has fattened this one up into a book of enormous proportions. Huge quantities of factual narrative have been injected into it, in the hope of beguiling reviewers into acknowledging its historical respectability. For all that, the underlying argument is simple – the title gives it away. Britain began to go to the dogs in ...”

“... unlike his more honourable namesake, never even got his seaboots off before he drowned). H.G. Wells’s story ‘The Grisly Folk’, as well as The Outline of History as quoted in an epigraph, prompted the remarkable switch of perspective at the end of The Inheritors, by means of which, after for so long looking, hearing and feeling with the ...”

“... like The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886) were received by the public. H.G. Wells’s satirical attack on James in Boon (1915) was another matter, however, and not merely because it came from someone he had hitherto regarded as a friend. This was not engaged criticism, as James saw it, but something more like a gesture of contempt, and ...”

“... SF is the tradition originating not in Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein but rather in H.G. Wells’s technological prognostications. The Hard SF tradition likes Jules Verne, the predictor of submarines and holograms, but frowns at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF ...”

“... who had a house by Bishopsbourne, but the two elder children used to attend the parties of a Mr Wells, who turned out to be H.G. Brooke’s nanny (from some early mispronunciation always known as Ninny), by creed a strict Baptist, was a preponderant figure in his life, and (like the country round about) remained so virtually to the end of his days. He was ...”

“... assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which ...”

“... and pompous jurist’ Sir Frederick Pollock and other establishment adornments, through to H.G. Wells’s argument for a ‘Declaration of Rights’ in a letter to the Times in September 1939. Britain’s First World War leaders used the lure of the franchise and the promise of ‘rights’ for minority peoples to galvanise support. What Churchill described ...”