“... of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s ...”

“... Imagist poetry, the rise of Russian studies, detective fiction, the League of Nations. Her aim is high: she argues that taken together these lives suggest a new way of looking at the mid-20th century.Square Haunting goes on the blink every now and then, losing its focus and unravelling into a series of lively, but separate, crammed essays. Yet at the centre ...”

“... lives’. She had no humour exactly, but both she and Lawrence had a great instinct for the high comic-grotesque, in their own and others’ lives – a sense both Dostoevskian and Germanic. It must have made them roar when her husband’s sister Maude compared her to the Titanic (which had just gone down), not seeing the mischief she did any more than ...”

“... not always respectable) riches, who found an admirer in Edward VII and an outspoken critic in H.G. Wells. Faced with such varied material, Aslet sorts his houses into two basic types: the social and the romantic. The social house was built on the grandest of scales for the richest of the rich: some patricians, most parvenus. Smart, glossy, luxurious and ...”

“... The man who invented tomorrow, explored the making of a TV documentary about a famous writer, H.G. Wells. In The Pork Butcher it would not have been appropriate to explore the contrast between fiction and documentary explicitly or self-consciously. In fact, it would be absurd to suppose that every novel ought to be a metafiction or self-conscious novel. More ...”

“... to hardworking silence.’ Even the use of the word ‘nipple’ was controversial in 1938; H.G. Wells reported that the book made him feel as though he’d been ‘thrown into a washing basket full of used nursery napkins’, though his tone seems closer to mock outrage than to the real thing. The image of the squire’s baby falling asleep immediately ...”

“... women in the home. Some thought that motherhood should be remunerated, Eleanor Rathbone and H.G. Wells among them – but was this not tantamount, others asked, to treating women like paid servants or even prostitutes? Freedom from the home, the more radical argued, was freedom to make a life for one’s self, and to love out of desire rather than the need ...”

“... By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former fanzine which the editor, John Carnell, had managed to keep sporadically in print – was purchased by the trade publishing firm Maclaren’s and began coming out monthly ...”

“... but also innovative study in the new Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars ...”

“... The book concludes with another informative chapter contrasting the career of H.G. Wells, who ‘remained essentially an Edwardian all his life’, with that of May Sinclair, whose concern with literary form and the representation of consciousness identifies her as a forerunner of Woolf and Richardson. Miller gives an illuminating account of ...”

“... John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending him a copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed it to ‘Oxford’s only civilising influence’. To those who, in 1931, goggled and giggled at his innkeeping confessions, Fothergill was the contumacious dandy for ever locked in combat with ‘clients’ who fell short of his standards, a man prepared to track down and rebuke a brigadier-general who, with his wife, dropped in to the Spreadeagle to use the lavatory without a please or thank you ...”

“... was not reciprocated because his contemporaries were not able to understand his great vision.’ High-level suicide was a Viennese preoccupation at the turn of the century – as witness the deaths of the royal lovers at Mayerling, and those of the brothers of both Mahler and Wittgenstein. Indeed, Wittgenstein himself had contemplated studying under ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had created something of a splash in 1869 with his Hereditary Genius, purporting to correlate high achievement with particular bloodlines. In work by others inspired by Galton’s example, the easily transmitted cultural advantages of a social elite were sometimes mistaken for manifestations of biological heredity. In the early decades of the 20th century ...”

“... his early years in London he worked as a tutor to the sons of upper-middle-class families, earning high praise for the inventiveness and patience of his methods. He never gave up his efforts to encourage his younger siblings to share his love of the classical and modern works that he found – in his favourite youthful adjective – ‘glorious’. Some of the ...”