“... years. Success eluded him during his lifetime, although some prescient fellow writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid and H.G. Wells, had marked him as a major talent. Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless North-Eastern coastal region that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the six-year-old Weldon’s bed; and ghosts unaccountably darken the rooms at her New Zealand high school (a sort of advance haunting, she now thinks, by the woman who was to be killed nearby in the murder dramatised in the film Heavenly Creatures). Later, there is the drowned pastor she sees on the pier at St Andrews; the poltergeist in Somerset that ...”

“... favourite subject-matter for these Frenchifying novelists (whose residence in the town of Rye H.G. Wells pretended to consider a national threat) was, very properly, Englishness: they liked to present to themselves, as an artistic problem, the deep mystery of English ‘honour’, English manners and English impassiveness. The rendering of the supposed English ...”

“... contrasted with Bellamy’s hyper-efficient, all-powerful state. Without Looking backward, H.G. Wells would not have written The sleeper awakes (where Bellamy’s utopia becomes a technological nightmare, and the Sleeper himself seizes dictatorial power). Nor would Fritz Lang have filmed his Metropolis. Such dystopias as Zamyatin’s We, or Huxley’s Brave ...”

“... were many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their conversation. Quick to forget her own afflictions when she sensed greater distress, she did all she could to help Charlotte Mew, whom she pitied and admired. ‘What a pathetic ...”

“... cramped confines of the self. Beauty as well as truth was at stake. Henry James once chided H.G. Wells for incorporating autobiography into his novels: ‘There is, to my vision, no authentic, & no really interesting & no beautiful, report of things on the novelist’s, the painter’s part unless a particular detachment has operated.’ Levine recognises ...”

“... in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name entered his head. The public first heard of Metroland in 1915, when the railway used it in a penny booklet listing country walks. The ultimate intention was not merely to attract rail passengers but to encourage ...”

“... Poe’s elaborately plotted ‘balloon hoax’ with leading the way for Jules Verne and H.G. Wells – not to mention the great 20th-century hoaxer, Orson Welles. He wasn’t to be trusted. But what was never in question was his talent – or genius, as he rightly preferred to call it. Born into a down-and-out theatre family and left an orphan at the age ...”

“... that was meant to come in numbers has been hollowed out or fractured. Carlyle saw London as ‘a huge aggregate of little systems, each of which is again a small anarchy, the members of which do not work together, but scramble against each other’. Henry James would refer to the capital’s ‘horrible numerosity’ and a ‘bigness … fatal to ...”

“... In Town Tonight. It may be so, but then again it may not. The Oxford don may have been delayed at High Table, and the typist may have gone to her trade-union branch. What LeMahieu means to indicate here is the existence of a unified public, with identifiable wants which the mass media were able to supply. What the public wants was the title of a 1909 play by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... written one for more than thirty years.’ It is the living voice of that grumpy old man. H.G. Wells, whose ‘taste is not for delicate writing’, can occasionally irrupt with invincible common sense: ‘he puts Katherine Mansfield above Virginia Woolf, a “too well-educated woman writing her best” ’ – which at least provides food for thought; he ...”

“... produced by the chance occurrence at the same time of an unusually strong upper-level ridge of high pressure and unusually moist ground conditions’. The human consequence was that between 14 and 20 July, according to Klinenberg, ‘739 more Chicago residents died than in a typical week for that month.’ The city was wholly unprepared for the ...”