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“... of his life. We started making trips to second-hand bookshops, in Eastbourne, Hastings, Tunbridge Wells. On a trip to Guildford he suddenly stopped outside a bag shop and offered to buy me a pigskin wallet. The book on transgression is fascinated by the unstable symbolic status of the pig, which it describes as the most useful of all animals to think ...”

“... Surely this is neither fine writing nor plain writing, but just bad writing? But if Kipling or Wells might in their own ways have done Erewhon better, and E.M. Forster The Way of All Flesh, that does not affect Butler’s influence and individuality, his power to create himself as ‘master of his life’. It is significant that Virginia Woolf’s praise ...”

“... light of one intriguing anecdote included in this book. It appears that on a visit to Maugham H.G. Wells drew his fingers along the edition of his complete works that he had presented to his fellow author. ‘You know, they’re dead,’ he said. ‘They deal with matters of topical interest and now of course they’re unreadable.’ Maugham considered they ...”

“... and the answer is another 20 years of imperfectly edited (or unedited) Orwell, Greene, Eliot, Wells and any other canonical author who died after 1925. The proposed reform is particularly tantalising for scholars like Patrick Parrinder, who has been working for some years on a revised team-edition of H.G. Wells (died ...”

“... spill of figs                        the unexpected chill of spice-haunted wells or miles of cicadas                                     stopped in the noontime lull though we guessed that the angel of roads or the panic of standstills was less than the weight of ourselves being lost or found ...”

“... it have been like to fall in love with the young Martin Amis, ‘the most fascinating man’ Gully Wells had ever met? ‘Only the most awful clichés,’ she tells us, ‘could possibly do justice to the way I felt.’ He was ‘very funny and very clever’; ‘he made me laugh and told me things I didn’t know.’ She is a bit more specific about his ...”

“... had to be destroyed, but the temples themselves should be kept and converted to Christian uses. Wells and healing springs that had been frequented in pagan times were rededicated to Christian saints. St Winefride’s Well in North Wales attracted royal patronage and papal indulgences. St Patrick’s Purgatory was a complex of caves on an island in Lough ...”

“... movement. Cheyette traces the Disraelian influence on the ‘imperial Gothic’ fiction of John Buchan and, more controversially, borrows August Bebel’s phrase ‘the socialism of fools’ as a blanket term for the ideas of Shaw and Wells. Bebel’s concern was to attack the kind of socialism, typified in a British ...”

“... of them was that the Church bought out its partners at an early stage and at a generous price. Sir John Hall, the Newcastle entrepreneur, was bought out of the Gateshead Metro shopping centre before it was built. He got £40m, but the Church kept losing money on the project until it was finally sold at a staggering loss in 1990. Sir ...”

“... which seems to have been left bare, matches the striations in the brushmarks below. The grain wells around a knot, which suddenly makes sense of the image as a seascape with a setting sun. ‘The Sea, Goa’ (2013) The picture recalls an experience, someone close to Hodgkin told me, of sitting last year on a terrace looking out onto the beach at Goa ...”

“... and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. ...”

“... preferred The Country House to The Man of Property, which is very hard to explain; he turned down Wells’s The Time Machine, which is less difficult, for he liked ‘Hogarthian truthfulness’ better than fantasy; and he wrote a respectful but dismissive report on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, saying it needed a lot of work. It was ‘too ...”