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“... eyes. ‘They were the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in my whole life. They were like wells; you fell into them,’ the 26-year-old Ingrid Bergman said, who had had a success in a San Francisco production of Anna Christie but wouldn’t let O’Neill lure her away from her film ambitions. At O’Neill’s melancholy core was a trifecta of turmoil ...”

“... and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched ...”

“... from a kind of generalised Darwinism. More original is the assertion that Woolf ‘remembers’ John Tyndall’s work on light and heat when describing the colour of the sky as ‘the blue that has escaped registration’ (Between the Acts) – Tyndall having established in the 1870s that the blue of the sky was distance, not colour. The very structure of ...”

“... There are moments in his diaries when the utopian strain surfaces like one of the dreams of H.G. Wells. Even in the middle of the First World War Amery could imagine a self-sufficient Empire immune from the troubles of Europe. In May 1915 he wrote to Milner: ‘All this harping on Prussian militarism as something that must be rooted out, as itself criminal ...”

“... of the destruction ... The central image of the scene is not her fangs or even the blood that wells from her, but the strapping arm the little monks hold down as they prepare to stake her ... The sequence is closer to gang rape, or to gynaecological surgery, or to any of the collective violations women were and are prone to than to the sacred marriage ...”

“... producers, CBS, who had to apologise to listeners, the Federal Communications Commission and H.G. Wells, all of whom appeared shocked. CBS made Welles apologise too and settled out-of-court claims for injuries received by panicking listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the ...”

“... something rather different about the Spring Gardens, as they were originally known, at Vauxhall. John Evelyn, an early visitor, described the site in July 1661 as ‘a pretty contriv’d plantation’. The trees there were said to be a hundred years old in 1661. The gardens offered ‘a universal withdrawing room for the city’, as Borg and Coke put it, the ...”

“... Chiltern Court, completed at the decade’s end, was quick to attract those luxury-lovers, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. When Bennett lay dying there in 1931, according to Reginald Pound’s biography, straw was laid on the roadway to deaden the traffic noise – the last time, possibly, such a courtesy was extended to an expiring citizen in the heart of ...”

“... with Kipling’s narrowness and a host of other national failures. His highest praise for H.G. Wells is that ‘he has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.’ It’s not Chesterton’s fault that his idea should have become so popular with people who didn’t have to go to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shavings on the floor.I knew that the captain of the Bonhomme Richard had been a Scotsman called John Paul Jones: I had once passed through Kirkbean, the Kirkcudbrightshire village where he was born. And I was vaguely aware that Jones had been involved in a daring raid on Whitehaven in Cumbria, although – since he was said to be the father of the US navy ...”

“... SF is the tradition originating not in Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein but rather in H.G. Wells’s technological prognostications. The Hard SF tradition likes Jules Verne, the predictor of submarines and holograms, but frowns at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by ...”

“... out ‘it was snowing butterflies,’ and such in fact was the appearance.In 1845 the publisher John Murray reissued the book for a large public. Darwin became a literary celebrity. Voyage of the Beagle (to use the title Murray gave it) is a vivid travelogue, but it also carries heavy theoretical freight. Darwin was struck by ‘how exactly the animals and ...”

“... chaps should be doing about Our Times. The Ruthenes have nothing to worry about. As rewritten for John Major’s times, England’s epic is all regression. Gilgamesh is Lewis Carroll in disguise: the Queen of Hearts raves uninterruptedly through 11 sanguinary, doom-sodden chapters, then at the end Alice pops out and tells everybody to behave. Where does ...”

“... Nye was brought on by tension and repression,’ writes Jennie Lee: Even now the old bitterness wells up inside me when I recall the depth of his sadness during the hysterical attacks on him by some anti-bomb warriors who ought to have known better. Of course they were not all like that. Michael Foot and Nye, for instance, quarrelled violently. But there ...”