QI The Book of the Dead

Elizabeth von Arnim. Richardson was a school friend of Jane’s and her underrated novel Pilgrimage (1915) invented the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ technique that Virginia Woolf later made famous. It also contained a vivid portrait of life in the Wells household. An affair with Bertie, it appeared (rather as with Casanova), could be great fun and a tonic for the ego. Here he is writing to Margaret Sanger:
    My plans in New York are ruled entirely by the wish to be with you as much as possible – & as much as possible without other people about. I don’t mind paying thousands of dollars if I can get that .
     
    He added that she was, at all costs, to dress up in the ‘costume of a tropical island … Everything else is secondary to this.’
    In 1907 Wells addressed the Cambridge University Fabian Society, which had been founded the previous year by a sparkling young undergraduate called Amber Reeves. After the talk, Wells bundled her on to a train and took her to Paris for the weekend. She was, he wrote:
    a girl of brilliant and precocious promise … a sharp, bright, Levantine face under a shock of very fine abundant black hair , a slender nimble body very much alive, and a quick greedy mind .
     
    Two years later, she was pregnant with Bertie’s child. This dismayed her mother and father (they were friends of Wells), and the couple ran away to Le Touquet and tried to make a go of it. It lasted three months. Amber was lonely and depressed and Wells put her on a ferry back to England. There, she found comfort in the arms of a mutual friend, a young lawyer called George Rivers Blanco White, who gallantly married her before the child was born. Amber’s daughter, Anna-Jane, was eighteen before she found out that H. G. Wells was her real father.
    In 1912 the precocious feminist journalist Rebecca West wrote a critical review of Wells’s novel Marriage , calling him an ‘old maid’. As we know, Wells liked spirited young women so he (forty-six) invited her (twenty) to tea. She gave birth to his son Anthony in 1914, and the boy was told that Wells was his ‘uncle’. Anthony’s second name was ‘Panther’, the nickname Wells had used for Amber. (Amber had called him ‘Jaguar’.) Messy as all this sounds, it actually worked out quite well for everyone. In 1939 Amber wrote to Wells to say that neither she nor her daughter had ever, for a moment, felt ‘they were not worth the price’.
    Wells visited Russia twice, in 1914 and 1920, and he met and impressed the writer Maxim Gorky there. Not everyone was so generous. After a brief meeting, Lenin called him ‘a dreadful bourgeois and a little philistine!’ For his part, Wells disliked the cult of personality that surrounded Karl Marx, whose face loomed from every wall and notice board:
    About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved .
     
    The highlight of the second trip for Wells was, true to form, the addition of a new lover. She was his interpreter, Baroness Moura Budberg (1892–1974). The Baroness had been married twice, firstly to the Tsarist diplomat Count Johann Benckendorff and then, after he was shot by the revolutionary authorities in 1919, to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen. She had also been the mistress (at different times) of Maxim Gorky (who had recommended her to Wells) and the British spy Sir R. H. Bruce Lockhart, author of the bestselling Memoirs of a Secret Agent (1932). Moura was known as the ‘Mata Hari of Russia’. Her MI5 file recorded ‘that she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin’. It was she who, as early as 1951, was to tip off MI6 that Sir Anthony Blunt was a communist, her other claim to distinction being that she was the great-aunt of Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. She was twenty-four years younger than H.G. Wells, but it was no casual fling. After the death of his wife Jane in 1927, Moura became Wells’s closest female friend and he would later confide: ‘She was the only woman I really