“... house in Warwick Gardens,’ he began, ‘and turn to the left, I find myself in what is called High St, Kensington. It is not high, it is quite flat, and it is a long way from Kensington, three reasons why it should not bear that name. It has, however, a distinguishing peculiarity. There are seven tobacconists, each of ...”

“... and the answer is another 20 years of imperfectly edited (or unedited) Orwell, Greene, Eliot, Wells and any other canonical author who died after 1925. The proposed reform is particularly tantalising for scholars like Patrick Parrinder, who has been working for some years on a revised team-edition of H.G. Wells (died ...”

“... this is ‘an alternative, Jewish history of our times’. ‘History’ is not quite accurate. A huge quantity of press-cuttings have been fed into its pages, but they are mere grist to Selbourne’s meditative mill. What he aims to do is tell us the meaning of our times by placing them in a self-consciously Hebraic perspective. The Christians and (more ...”

“... as packed with ideas and argumentative passages as the ‘prig novels’ of Samuel Butler and H.G. Wells. Although Byatt herself attended Cambridge, there is a feeling of thesis-illustration and slightly strained invention in Frederica’s adventures there. One sees it in the names of the luminaries who gather around her, names such as Raphael Faber (compare ...”

“... which is the novel’s driving conceit, is plainly impossible, which is the point: like H.G. Wells in The Invisible Man or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Miéville takes an impossible proposition and works through its implications with rigour. At some moments the novel resembles a thought-experiment in semiotics, except that it’s at least as interested ...”

“... excess was to bind together the community of itching nonconformists. In Anticipations (1902), H.G. Wells contemplated with equanimity the likely disappearance of a number of institutions Kipling might have been thought to cherish, including ‘permanent monogamous marriage’. But he also waxed sardonic on the subject of cavalry generals of the old school, and ...”

“... will be available for use and the universe will grind to a halt. In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells evoked this grim prospect. As his travellers approach the far distant future, ‘the darkness grew apace … All the sounds of man … the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.’In the 1940s, Claude Shannon – an American ...”

“... that Blériot was more popular than Napoleon. The Channel had not yet been conquered when H.G. Wells published his lurid The War in the Air, which had German Zeppelin-style dirigibles attacking the American fleet and raining bombs on New York; and, since Wells subscribed to the Yellow Peril, it also had a German airship ...”

“... In the 1920s he fought a six-year feud, and expended 100,000 words, in an attempt to deflate H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, which brushed aside Christianity and held that scientific progress was all. Next came a vicious dispute over the falsification of history with Professor G.G. Coulton, of whom it was remarked that ‘the law of correspondence with Dr ...”

“... visits of the supernatural stories on which Paget was working intermittently. Paget herself had no high regard for them: Gothic stories were in fashion; for her, they were light relief from a life dedicated to intellectual endeavour. Her more serious work remains, for good reason, neglected, but the best of the ghost stories have remained in print. Richly ...”

“... stirring at the next station, South Kensington, where, as Kate knows, he would normally alight. By High Street Kensington, he has taken the seat opposite; by Notting Hill Gate, he is at her elbow. ‘The extraordinary part of the matter,’ James observes, ‘was that they were not in the least meeting where they had left off, but ever so much further on, and ...”

“... to Evelyn Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as ...”

“... This is Alasdair Gray’s funniest novel, his most high-spirited, and his least uneven. All of which does not necessarily make it his best, but certainly means that we have a nice surprise on our hands when you consider that Gray has spent much of the last few years publicly and gloomily announcing the death of his fictional imagination ...”

“... the reconstruction (now known to be mistaken) of Neanderthals as stooped and shuffling. Thus H.G. Wells cast them, in The Grisly Folk, as troglodytic trollops racially distinct from modern people, who are tall, erect and white. Today Jean Auel’s novel The Clan of the Cave Bear tells the story of a young girl of anatomically ‘Modern’ stock (in other ...”

“... His science fiction is not visionary but gamesome. It has more in common with Nintendo than H.G. Wells or Hugo Gernsback. But Banks does not (like the cyberpunk William Gibson) mock the great traditions of the genre; there are moments when Against a Dark Background, for instance, recalls the kitsch utopianism of Asimov’s ...”