Extract: THE COMING OF BLERIOT (July, 1909.) The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks a trunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real message comes through: "Bleriot has crossed the Channel.... An article ... about what it means." I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my friends. From my garden I look straight upon the Channel,...

Extract: THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD. I. In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called-"Scientists." They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were-that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country. But the Great Public and its Press...

Plot summary While attempting to summit the unconquered crest of Parascotopetl (a fictitious mountain in Ecuador), a mountaineer named Nunez (prn: noon-yes) slips and falls down the far side of the mountain. At the end of his descent, down a snow-slope in the mountain's shadow, he finds a valley, cut off from the rest of the world on all sides by steep precipices. Unbeknownst to Nunez, he has discovered the fabled "Country of the Blind." The valley had been a haven for settlers fleeing the tyranny of Spanish rulers, until an earthquake reshaped the surrounding mountains, cutting the valley...

Extract: THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHARLOTTE The world mends. In my younger days people believed in mahogany; some of my readers will remember it-a heavy, shining substance, having a singularly close resemblance to raw liver, exceedingly heavy to move, and esteemed on one or other count the noblest of all woods. Such of us as were very poor and had no mahogany pretended to have mahogany; and the proper hepatite tint was got by veneering. That makes one incline to think it was the colour that pleased people. In those days there was a word "trashy," now almost lost to the world. My dear...

Extract: Locomotion in the Twentieth Century It is proposed in this book to present in as orderly an arrangement as the necessarily diffused nature of the subject admits, certain speculations about the trend of present forces, speculations which, taken all together, will build up an imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go in this new century. 1] Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces of the performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almost invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of the...

Extract: FRUITS OF CULTURE ACT I The entrance hall of a wealthy house in Moscow. There are three doors: the front door, the door of Leonid Fyodoritch's study, and the door of Vasily Leoniditch's room. A staircase leads up to the other rooms; behind it is another door leading to the servants' quarters. Scene 1. GREGORY looks at himself in the glass and arranges his hair, &c.] I am sorry about those moustaches of mine "Moustaches are not becoming to a footman," she says And why? Why, so that any one might see you're a footman, -else my looks might put her darling son to shame. He's a likely...

Passionate lovers, Mary Justin and Steven Stratton, were in love when they were young, but since they separated. She married an older but wealthy man, Howard Justin. At one point, Mary and Steven start seeing each other again, but Howard succeeded in persuading Mary to stop the connection. A few years later, Mary met by chance Steven while on vacation in the Alps. They go for a walk. Howard, come to join his wife, sees them together and understands wrong. He decides to divorce. Mary, desperate, goes to see Howard and tries to talk to her. He gets angry and tells him he never wants to see her...

The Island of Dr. Moreau is a science fiction novel written by HG Wells, published in 1896. Through a story narrated by a narrator overwhelmed by events, the novel engages a reflection on Such as the relationship between man and animal, and the question of identity. Summary Unique survivor of a shipwreck, Edward Prendick is rescued by Montgomery and his team, passenger of a ship heading for a tropical island with a cargo of animals. Montgomery is the assistant to Dr. Moreau, a scientist obsessed with vivisection and blood transfusion. Prendick discovers with dismay that for the past ten years...

The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialized in The English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells's affair with Amber Reeves and satirized Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was "the literary scandal of its day." Plot summary The New Machiavelli purports to be written in the first person by its protagonist, Richard "Dick" Remington, who has a lifelong passion for "statecraft" and who dreams of recasting the social and political form of the English nation. Remington is a brilliant student at Cambridge, writes several books on political themes,...

Plot summary The text of this novel of ideas presents itself as a book that has been written as the result of a promise to a dying man. William Porphyry Benham is a man who has lived a life devoted to a complicated, protean idea: "that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly." He has left behind him "half a score of patent files quite distended with papers] and a writing-table drawer-full," and the novel is by implication what his friend White, who has promised to "see after your book," has produced to acquit himself of the promise, since the papers themselves are "an indigestible...