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“... Nine Lessons and Carols during the darkest days of the war along with Dadie Rylands, perhaps, E.M. Forster and Maynard Keynes. As it was, come 1941 and all I was doing was giving my shepherd abiding in the fields in the Upper Armley National School nativity play.27 November. The wife of Nicholas Farrell is having a baby and it had been agreed before ...”

“... without them, what kind of life will you live? Despite its limitations, Alexandria – which E.M. Forster once described as a city ‘founded upon cotton, with the concurrence of onions and eggs, ill built, ill planned, ill drained’ – holds the promise without which Cavafy could not live, even though it would culminate in betrayal and ...”

“... with Wilson’s new canonisation is the showing in London of Merchant-Ivory’s film adaptation of E.M  Forster’s Howard’s End, and a new novel from Ian McEwan. To a reader of First Love, Last Rites or In Between the Sheets it will seem an odd conjunction. Nevertheless, it is to Wilson’s implicit prescription that McEwan’s novels seem increasingly ...”

“... have been a doctor or a lawyer,’ he was particularly annoyed by indolent celebrities – E.M. Forster was one offender – who didn’t go out of their way to stun by weight. As someone who preferred to end his short stories ‘with a full-stop rather than with a straggle of dots’, he also grew impatient with writers who ‘give you the materials for a ...”

“... some is the exploitation of others, so that truly self-consistent liberals, the Thomas Manns and E.M Forsters of this world, must acknowledge the tainted roots of their own liberties. Besides, it is implausible to imagine in a post-Freudian age that the obstacles to our self-realisation are all conveniently on the outside. If they were simply that, we might ...”

“... disowned. ‘We must love one another or die,’ he had written, a sentiment much admired by E.M. Forster among others, but, as Auden later told the story, he quickly realised ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway’: so he changed it to ‘We must love one another and die,’ which is hardly worth saying; then he decided to cut the stanza; and then he ...”

“... in a perhaps only slightly complex tone) produced like a rabbit out of a hat a friend of E.M. Forster’s, who happened to be slight in physical build, though surely large in moral stature. Carpenter describes the ceremony in cool flat prose, the huge bride and tiny groom, the splendid bouquet and the amazed registrar, and Auden buying everyone large ...”

“... in our 1965 spring tour, he scribbled it on a cheerful self-introductory note thrust under E.M. Forster’s door. Forster later inquired: ‘Is the fellow mad?’ When Ginsberg heard this, he thought it was flattering. In Howl, we recall, it is precisely the madness of the Beat generation’s ‘best ...”

“... wealth – having it or losing it or wanting even more of it – can do to them. He was, in E.M. Forster’s phrase, ‘a foreigner in a front seat’, ‘well-placed for observing the airs and graces of the great’. The Sturgises were themselves a wealthy Boston family – James had been a friend of Howard’s father, Russell, who was the head of Barings ...”

“... and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of sticky passages in E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View and The Longest Journey. Forster, too, was a great admirer of The Way of All Flesh, about which there was nothing in the least sentimental. So quickly can emancipation become overripe. Yet ...”

“... as controls a small group of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects ...”

“... about this; but though she had equerries who were in the Guards she hardly felt able to ask. E.M. Forster figured in the book, with whom she remembered spending an awkward half hour when she invested him with the CH. Mouselike and shy he had said little and in such a small voice she had found him almost impossible to communicate with. Still, he was a bit of a ...”

“... What counts as a novel? Any ‘fictitious prose work’ over fifty thousand words was E.M. Forster’s answer, in Aspects of the Novel. It’s a broad enough definition, in all conscience, though it has begun to do some useful work by excluding a wide variety of short fiction in prose, and some long poems, such as Eugene Onegin or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems ...”

“... Malcolm ponders the last-mentioned syndrome: Unlike the flat characters of fiction (as E.M. Forster called them), who have no existence outside the novel they were invented to animate, the flat characters of biography are actual, three-dimensional people. But the biographer is writing a life not lives, and to keep himself on course, must cultivate a ...”

“... rebellious Davina in that ominous short tale ‘The Disinherited’; the insatiably romantic Emma of the story ‘Summer Night’; the dithering, self-distrusting, introspective Sydney Warren of Bowen’s very first novel, The Hotel, a prentice work memorable nearly half a century later if only because it shows in bud her later sophistication, relentless ...”