Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by William Orpen, Spencer Gore and Robert Bevan. A politician of forty-two, out of public life and living abroad, sets down how he rose through Liberal politics and what wrecked him. Wells filled the book with recognizable portraits of the Webbs and the Fabians he had lately quarreled with, and two circulating libraries refused to stock it. It is the most autobiographical of his novels and the least forgiving about the man telling it. Fifty-nine plates of painting, from Watts to Tissot, trace the storms, rivers and Tuscan hills that shadow this political confession.