“... shouting distance of the bridegroom’. Your traditional enemies were the ne’er-do-wells in the next village, known by a rude nickname. Robb asserts that such discrimination ‘was the lifeblood of tribal France’. There was nothing necessarily sinister about this: some, like the inhabitants of the remote Pyrenean village of Goust, or the ...”

“... stereotypes. His working-class dialogue seems to be based on recollections of the novels of H.G. Wells and of random conversations with college porters and cleaning-ladies: it stops just this side of Lawks-a-mussy. An ungenerous reading of the book would be that various proletarian and transatlantic characters have to be ushered (compassionately) into the ...”

“... Atlantis of the European mind, as vivid beneath the waves as it was above them. Norman Stone and Michael Glenny’s book is a scrapbook of Atlantis, an oral history of survivors from the sinking. Many of them were in their eighties when Glenny’s tape-recorder finally reached them in their close, cluttered rooms and for this alone – preserving these ...”

“... staffer of the Eye and co-published by the Eye. Reviewers? Auberon Waugh in the Daily Mail; John Wells twice, once in Harper’s and once in the Times; Christopher Booker in the Spectator; Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph; Candida Lycett-Green (who was in love with Ingrams at Oxford, speaks adoringly of him in this book, and once worked for the ...”

“... been most evident in manufacturing and the provision of welfare. Thirty years ago, Rowthorn and Wells explain, industry employed more people than all the services. ‘Never before, nor since, in any capitalist country at any time has industrial employment been significantly more important than it was in Britain in 1955.’ (At 48 per cent of the total, it ...”

“... the costs of land and of transport. One Edwardian he quotes but might have made more of is H.G. Wells. In an eloquent essay of 1901, Wells prophesied the problems which urbanists everywhere are facing today. Already, he saw, capitalism’s pursuit of lower costs was revolutionising the choice of location and unpicking the ...”

“... architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... prose not only animates the former’s early novels (intended to be ‘intellectual’ like H.G. Wells, ‘and improper like Compton Mackenzie’), but is just as evident in the prose texture of Tender is the Night, especially the first version. Mackenzie’s influence on the novel of the Twenties was enormous, although, as Linklater handsomely ...”

“... students and Linson’s artist friends in New York, literary figures like Willa Cather and H.G. Wells, and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no ...”

“... permission but local staff would occasionally try to interfere as he went at the oil wells with fire, dynamite and his personal sledgehammer. If the force of his personality failed to get them to back off, Daniel Yergin writes in The Prize, ‘he would deliver a powerful kick or pull out his revolver and shout: “I don’t speak your blasted ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... this kind of Edwardian thinking. It was fully articulated by Bernard Shaw, perfectly acceptable to Wells, and only opposed by such as G.K. Chesterton. Ms Grosskurth also hints, at this point in her book, at Ellis’s anti-semitism. What kind of figure was he then? One hesitates, in the pages of the London Review of Books, with its editorial opposition to ...”

“... pips were the bulbs of its lower-deck lights. It was quiet but not soundless. It was like the H.G. Wells story in which time is slowed down until sounds disintegrate into separate beats. Cars revved somewhere; a lorry far over towards Shoreditch hooted. A distant alarm pulsed. Across a distance which could have been far or close came the tap of a stick, then a ...”

“... early decades of this century, some Africans financed their pilgrimage by selling their children. Michael Wolfe’s The Hadj is the story of an American convert’s pilgrimage made in 1990. Wolfe, who also writes novels, conscientiously avoids the politics of the contemporary hajj and his responses seem curiously muted. He enjoyed many encounters with his ...”