“... back have sold getting on for $900m worth of tickets. C-3PO and R2-D2 are as well known as Pope John Paul or Mickey Mouse. Lucas’s second movie and first hit, American Graffiti (produced by Francis Coppola, conceived and directed by Lucas), was the most profitable investment in Hollywood history: it brought in $117m against a production cost of ...”

“... and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations authorise a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Peckham to Bermondsey in order to give it a more authentically working-class flavour (shades of John Major?). A generation earlier, H.G. Wells grew up in a basement kitchen with a mother as discontented as Steedman’s and Woodward’s, a mother who abandoned the domestic hearth, and forced her younger son out into the ...”

“... image. Although she had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she ...”

“... eyed askance or turned askew. Like Dedalus in the Irish National Library, trying to impress A.E., John Eglinton and Mr Best with his theory of Hamlet, the narrator of Nothing Like the Sun throws in lots of local colour, freely kitsched with quasi-Elizabethan compounds and archaic turns of phrase. Moreover, following Dedalus’s example in Ulysses, Burgess ...”

“... recognition that it is as impressive ‘in its way and for its date’ as that of Chartres and Wells. But to dispel the prejudice those qualifications need explanation, and more sympathy should be permitted expression. On the whole, however, he is right in the strategy he has adopted, which is simply to put us in a position where we are bound to question ...”

“... 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 ‘Foundation’ series. Philip ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is imprisoned largely because of love-complications (the same applies to McCarthy’s young John Grady Cole). Tortured, immured, separated from his beloved, Habrokomes is given the relief of a dream: he thought he saw his own father Lykomedes in black clothing travelling across all the lands and seas and arriving finally at his prison where he ...”

“... novels. Forster’s view of the celebrated and painful disagreement between James and H.G. Wells is expressed in Aspects of the Novel; he seems pleased rather than sympathetic to see James ridiculed, and even joins in the teasing. He firmly awards the judgment to Wells, a disquieting conclusion if you remember the ...”

“... MORE MUST WE TAKE?’ This ‘we’ lends itself to easy caricature. It is ‘Outraged, Tunbridge Wells’ writ large, an army of indignant blue rinse. It is the passive ‘we’ of embattled parents, distributing blame to the ungrateful children with the aggrieved cry ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ In the wake of the riots, every newspaper seems to ...”

“... long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 ...”

“... the force of Henry James’s passionate statement to a sceptical and uncomprehending H.G. Wells, that ‘the novel makes life, makes truth, makes understanding.’ The novelists had no trouble in making Pattison’s marriage interesting, but it was not interesting in itself. Only depressing, for both parties. George Eliot’s memorable portrait is of ...”

“... the editing and publication of Thackeray’s letters (nor did he deliver a promised Life of H.G. Wells – whose archive he had acquired, at vast cost, for Urbana). It was left to Edgar Harden to bring out the supplementary two volumes of the letters in 1994, after Ray’s death. With Gordon Haight and Edgar Johnson, Ray belonged to the heroic age of ...”