'The best non-fiction writer in America'

'A masterful New Journalism pioneer ... raises the magazine article to the level of an art form'

A monumental writer

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century

Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse.

A life-altering book would be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It's really thick and German. I like its sensibility, which is unashamedly intellectual.

A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing

Comparisons arise with The Waste Land, published two years earlier and also concerned to exhibit the futility of a way of life which had led to the horrors of the First World War. But while T. S. Eliot's poem is a pared-down epic of resonances and allusions, Mann's novel is a full-blown exploration, playing seemingly endless variations on the theme

The most life-changing novel

I read it with entire interest and enjoyment, and learned a lot about H. G. Wells

Lodge is to be congratulated for having filled [Wells's affairs] in with the relevant novelistic detail... It is a testimony to Lodge's powers that even a reader familiar with, frankly, the ins and outs of Wells's life will have trouble picking out the novel's imagined moments

[Lodge's] Wells is a complex, humane figure, driven by a mixture of rebellion against stultifying Victorian values, belief in a better was of shaping society and callous, hypocritical self-interest. It's an intriguing study of a time when many of the values that are bulwarks of our society were in their infancy

A racy...account of a life lived against the mainstream which makes one long to read Wells again

An interesting experiment and well suited to a subject who does have quite a bit of explaining to do

A treat of a read, not least because of the wonderful, rolling ease with which Lodge writes. Or, rather, with which it reads - prose like this does not come without effort.

Sex-charged whopper on the life and works of HG Wells

Colourful characters and outrageous events abound. Confident, pacy writing keeps the reader wondering what Wells will get up to next and pondering the complex relationships to which he seems addicted

Very, very good.... So confidently are facts and flights of imaginative fancy interwoven that readers will find themselves unwilling - and unable - to distinguish between the two

Consistently absorbing and enjoyable. I doubt whether a better way could have been found to bring the phenomenon that was H. G. Wells to life

Biographical fiction is on an upswing, to judge by this lively novel, faithful to the facts but free to interpret feelings

A Man of Parts has the lovely, loquacious qualities that typify eccentric wonders such as The War of the Worlds and The History of Mr Polly. David Lodge reminds us that Wells, an imperfect man, is still a worthy witness to his own world and to those worlds that may yet to come.

Lodge understands the Edwardian literary and political scene extremely well, and traces Wells's entanglements with the louche world of Fabians and free lovers with real intimacy

As protean, elusive but compelling as it's hero, David Lodge's bio-novel about HG Wells breaks all the rules but still grips the reader - like Wells himself

A wry, racy and absorbing biographical novel

Lodge knows how to tease the inner man out from behind the historical figure, subjecting Wells to probing interviews throughout the book in which his deeper beliefs and contradictions are laid bare

This fictionalised version of HG Wells dramatises the author's life, which was full of politics, writing and women

David Lodge's HG Wells was both a visionary and a chancer; as arrogant as he was insecure; with as many noble goals as base instincts; a mass of very human contradictions; as Lodge has it, a man of parts