Bliss expresses disappointment that among Boon's papers (kept in "barrels in the attic"[3]) he has found "nothing but fragments"[4] and "a curious abundance of queer little drawings,"[5] many of which are reproduced'.

The principal text by Boon that he presents is titled The Mind of the Race, which is "the singularly vivid and detailed and happily quite imaginary account of the murder of that eminent littérateur, Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole.

"[6] Bliss also recounts conversations about the themes of this work which he has had with Boon and with Edwin Dodd, "a leading member of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant agnostic,"[7] and later with an author named Wilkins.

"[10] In the unfinished work Boon was planning, a character named Hallery is "fanatically obsessed by this idea of the Mind of the Race,"[11] as indeed Wells was himself.

Chapter 7 criticises the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and lambastes Houston Stewart Chamberlain's pro-German 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.

But in the years preceding the war they fell out, in part because Wells resented James and his friends refusing to review Rebecca West's book about him in the Times Literary Supplement,[18] and in part over their differing aesthetic doctrines, with Wells arguing for a vigorous new realism that engaged "contemporary social development" in all its aspects, and James arguing that such an approach was a prostitution of art.

[21] The episodes which might induce a puzzled librarian to class the book as fiction are few, and only one of them (in addition to the parody on Henry James) rises to exceptional heights.