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“... Item: in 1684, there appeared John Oldham’s posthumous Remains in Verse and Prose, with a prefatory elegy by John Dryden, ‘Farewell, too little and too lately known’. Dryden’s poem has been much admired and praised – but not by Claude Rawson, who calls it variously ‘pompous’, ‘self-serving’, ‘overrated’, ‘unctuously self-exalting’, ‘self-promoting’, ‘pontifical’ and ‘patronising’ Item: in a chapter on Richardson (wittily called ‘Richardson, alas’ after ‘Hugo, hélas’), Rawson quotes a curious letter in which the novelist asks a friend to come to Tunbridge Wells, where she will be able to see a figure more ‘grotesque’ even than Beau Nash or Colley Cibber, ‘a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks, getting behind benches ...”

“... did for the New Statesman, which include studies of prominent writers as well as politicians – Wells and Bennett, Conrad and Shaw, as well as Lloyd George and his master, Beaverbrook – show a deeper talent for serious portraiture. The sketch, reproduced in this book, for his Asquith, described by Low as ‘aloof, old, worn, uncommunicative and more than ...”

“... When John Wesley visited Bath in 1739 to inveigh against the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know by what authority he was preaching. Wesley’s retort (or so he claimed) was ‘Pray, sir, are you a justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Training College near Birmingham, then found work as a PE teacher, eventually moving to Tunbridge Wells. ‘Now for me it is like going home,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘Over the hill south of Sevenoaks, and there is “my” country stretching in front of me. Each time I go back and I am surprised anew by the shattering beauty of the Weald.’ She travelled ...”

“... half a career, or the political and literary traditions which shaped the whole of it. Unlike Wells, say, Kipling is not a latecomer to the party who can be relieved of blunt implements at the door and coaxed apologetically towards the drinks. Nevertheless, canonisation – or at least the bulking-out of an oeuvre which sometimes accompanies it – has ...”

“... imaginaries such as Albert Robida and Warwick Goble who illumined the texts of Verne and Wells. It broke, too, with another tradition: that of integrated rationalism whose extreme manifestation was Le Corbusier’s glum Plan Voisin for the destruction of Paris, a self-advertisement worthy of a base politician. Archigram was a reaction to the purity ...”

“... from one another – a passage from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, Larkin’s ‘Dockery and Son’ – to see whether or not there is anything specific in them which they can be said to have in common with short stories. What this element is shown to be in both poems and stories, in so far as he is ...”

“... In this instance, the Bible as a book was an effective instrument of change. The Gospel of John puzzles Schniedewind, as it does most of us. ‘John’s own written work,’ he writes, ‘began by defining the true Word as a person, not a text: “In the beginning was the Word (...”

“... novels Snooty Baronet, The Revenge for Love and The Vulgar Streak. Explaining the last to H.G. Wells, Lewis claimed his own kind of up-to-dateness: ‘the doctrine by Mussolini from Les Réflexions sur la Violence and from Nietzsche (who got his stuff fundamentally from Darwin) – this doctrine taken over by Hitler and influencing so many minds in Europe ...”

“... the Earth – and countless giants, including a fire giant with a giant flaming sword. As in John of Patmos’s vision, the sun blackens and the stars fall out of the sky. In the Islamic version, the vicious cannibals of Yajuj and Majuj (Gog and Magog in the Old Testament) go on a killing spree, the Beast of the Earth appears – a monster with feet like ...”

“... arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on ...”

“... towards the realising of situations he had once imagined. The writers who met him in England – Wells, Kipling, Conrad, even the ever sceptical Henry James – were fascinated by Crane’s besoin de la fatalité, his air, which Scott Fitzgerald was to hit off so well in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed ...”

“... Holocaust as an event lying outside history, in which forces were unleashed that drew deeply on wells of irrationality, and individuals relinquished their humanity. For these younger writers, anything that implies ‘the insanity defence’ smells like an apologia: Gerlach argues that his work on Nazi starvation policy demonstrates that the perpetrators did ...”

“... a different future, there is no dearth of attempts to do so in the recent anthologies edited by John Carey and Catriona Kelly. Like all such collections of snippets from a wide variety of sources, they inevitably reflect their editors’ predilections rather than a canonical list of candidates for inclusion. The Kelly anthology, in fact, is more a grab-bag ...”