Richard Shone

There​ are very few people left who remember Lydia Lopokova, the Russian dancer who married Maynard Keynes. She was an enchanting character, almost extravagantly different from anyone else. Her beguiling vocabulary and way of talking prompted E.M. Forster to say that her ‘every word … should be recorded.’ Virginia Woolf wrote of ‘her genius of personality’ and...

My first sight​ of E.M. Forster was of him coming towards me on Clare Bridge in Cambridge. It was a cold afternoon in November 1968 and Forster was on his way back to King’s College, next door to Clare, where I was in my first term as an undergraduate. He was wearing a thick coat, striped tie and flat cap, and walked with a stick. He slightly shied away against the parapet of the...