There were other reasons for his failure in this struggle. He carelessly provided his enemies with live ammunition to be used against him. Leading Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs were low-sexed, if not asexual; Wells was a compulsive womaniser. Lodge suggests he may have had as many as a hundred women in his life. These days he might have been regarded as  a sex-pest. He was held to be an advocate of Free Love; this shocked the respectable. Some found his success not only reprehensible but inexplicable. He was small and unprepossessing in appearance, and his squeaky voice never lost its lower-middle-class accent, part rural Kent, part Cockney; he may have talked what is now known as "Estuary English". Yet he knocked over women and young girls like skittles. Many, especially the eager and intelligent undergraduates, picked themselves up and ran after him. One of his mistresses explained the attraction to a puzzled Somerset Maugham; Wells smelled, she said, of honey. For these young women , an affair with Wells was a liberating and exciting experience.

The most notable and durable of them was Rebecca West. Born Cecily (later changed to Cicily) Fairfield, she took her pen-name from an Ibsen heroine. Beautiful, intelligent and fiercely opinionated, she came to Wells's notice with a sharp review of his novel Marriage: "Of course," wrote the young woman, eagerly seeking to make her reputation by savaging an established author, "he is the old maid among novelists; even the sex-obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Macchiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid's reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids." Some might react with fury to such a review; Wells bedded its author.

Their love-affair was intense and stormy. West failed in her principal aim: to persuade Wells to leave his wife for her. That was never going to happen. H.G. and Jane Wells had a happy relationship. They had early come to an agreement that he could have mistresses so long as he didn't keep them secret from her. Indeed, with kindly good sense, Jane Wells had made friends of several of them and was happy to offer them hospitality when they became pregnant. In this respect at least, Wells ordered his life to his almost complete satisfaction. It should be said that if he pursued women, they were usually willing to be caught and in some cases it was the women who made the running, none more determinedly than Rebecca West. The casualty of their relationship was their son, Anthony, who grew up believing that Rebecca was his aunt and H.G. his uncle. He came to revere and love his father, but was bitterly at odds with his mother. H.G. won again.

Lodge recounts the roller-coaster of H.G.'s love-life with relish — some might say too indulgent a relish. But he treats it consistently with good sense and good humour.