Paul Johnson reviews Michael Sherborne’s biography of H.G. Wells in the August Literary Review. “Between the wars,” Johnson tells us, “much of Wells’s extraordinary energy went into rows with mistresses.… He seems to have had the habit of picking on fierce women, then goading them into even fiercer behavior by his treatment of them. I must say I found the celebrated Rebecca West pretty ferocious. But Odette Keun, his mistress from 1924 to 1932, appears to have been even more of a Tartar.” PJ then quotes one of Ms. Keun’s letters to Wells:

Curse and blast and s*** the day on which we decided to live together, you swine, and the house you built, and what you did and what you are. Can’t that diabetes of yours carry you off at last! The time and energy you make me waste! God damn you everlastingly.

Makes one’s own love life seem pretty flat and colorless. Well, mine. Well, mostly.