The Young HG Wells:
Changing The World
by Claire Tomalin 

Viking, £20, 272 pages 

It’s hard to get a sense, 100 and more years on, of quite what a big deal HG Wells was in his day: not simply the author of a handful of pioneering and much-adapted science-fiction stories, but a political agitator whose prophecies and prescriptions were deeply influential, and a linchpin of the pre-war literary scene. Claire Tomalin’s new book – which focuses on the young (or youngish) Wells because, as she says with winning candour, though he lived until 1946, all the good stuff was done by the First World War – opens with a description of two 11-year old schoolmates in 1914 who were obsessed with Wells. They were (or became) Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, and the former is quoted to the effect that “the minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed”.