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“... work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine had no chance against ‘literary’ authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted for Martyn Goff’s real thing. In 1940, T.S. Eliot struck the ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... Late in 1900 H.G. Wells sat down to draft the series of articles which were to make his reputation as the foremost prophet of the new century. His working title was ‘Speculations’ or ‘The New Prospectus’, and the essays were later published as Anticipations. His friend Arnold Bennett referred to them mockingly as ‘Uncle’s-dissipations’, but for Wells futurology was anything but a sideline ...”

“... If Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot had achieved Cabinet rank together in the 1960s, the United Kingdom would be in better shape now. ‘That is my truth,’ as Bevan used to say. ‘Now tell me yours.’ What have they in common, though, this leftist Gang of Three, the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scot, Bevan, his wife and his friend, all from such different backgrounds? They have similar opinions, of course: but what of their human and moral nature, their style of writing and speaking? It may be worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers ...”

“... MORE MUST WE TAKE?’ This ‘we’ lends itself to easy caricature. It is ‘Outraged, Tunbridge Wells’ writ large, an army of indignant blue rinse. It is the passive ‘we’ of embattled parents, distributing blame to the ungrateful children with the aggrieved cry ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ In the wake of the riots, every newspaper seems to ...”

“... for him, ended a decade or so before his death in 1946, a month short of his 80th birthday), H.G. Wells was one of the world’s leading literary and intellectual celebrities. Hailed as ‘a man of genius’ on the appearance of his breakthrough book, The Time Machine (1895), he went on to publish roughly two books a year for the next five decades. When The ...”

“... pair – ‘two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public cause,’ as H.G. Wells characterised them in The New Machiavelli – was the oddest romance in the Fabian calendar and a triumph for Sidney’s policy of gradualism. Beatrice was 34 at the time of their marriage and apparently determined to prove an old maid. Handsome, with huge ...”

“... into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see’; ‘everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him.’ The movie murderer is not such a connoisseur, and he doesn’t philosophise quite as much as his print counterpart (‘how to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge ...”

“... scientists and technocrats, most famously and prolifically articulated in the novels of H.G. Wells. It is in this fertile, Fin-de-Siècle context of confused and competing Utopias that these two authors set their studies of conjugal crusaders which tell us much about informed, élite attitudes to Utopian ideas in this most recent phase of sustained and ...”

“... and they tell her their stories. Some characters from the book (Linda May, Charlene Swankie, Bob Wells) play themselves in the movie, with impeccable conviction. The stories often concern illness and death, grief and loss, the conditions that led to a life on the road, and there is often bravery and wit in the telling, a refusal to give in to the despair ...”

“... was an accommodating Old Etonian called Jim Shelley. Their commercial property manager was Michael Hutchings, a young eccentric known as ‘the man with the golden nose’ – a reference not only to his ability to sniff out a nice little earner in the property market, but also to his highly-developed taste for wine. Hutchings loved travel and his work ...”

“... and greatness. Where Shakespeare is concerned, such issues are especially vexing. As Stanley Wells, the General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, engagingly remarks in the title essay of Modernising Shakespeare’s Spelling,* they drive an editor to ‘a state of impotent neurosis, or drink, or an early grave’. To take one example from Troilus (and I ...”

“... in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass ...”

“... between its two central characters. Francine Snaith – ‘the tarty temp from Tunbridge Wells’ who sets out to ensnare the hapless Ralph Loman, driven by a mixture of boredom, malice and neediness – is a fairly memorable figure. But the elevated style in which Cusk describes her low-level manoeuvres is better suited to projecting ironic distance ...”

“... velveteen all day. I wore it only in the evening.’ Beneath the velveteen was venom. When H.G. Wells tried to propel the Fabians towards more vigorous political action there was a row with the Blands. When Wells was intercepted with Bland’s daughter Rosamund at Paddington Station, en route for the Continent, there was ...”