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“... on Mayhew. He’s not a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of ...”

“... as the epithalamia, sexier and less discreet than their ancient models, which served, as Leonard Forster argued long ago, as safety valves for Renaissance Latinists. Their arteries would have snapped like pipestems if they had been confined to writing chaste Petrarchan verse. Only​ in the late 18th century, Leonhardt argues, did elites gradually abandon ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me things. I had never expected it.’ After Blunt Julian’s affairs were heterosexual, but there were quite a few of them, they often ran concurrently and he provided a ...”

“... Thomson was gay, something he carefully, almost pathologically, sought to conceal all his life. Anthony Tommasini, in his recent biography of the composer, has dismissed the entire affair as a fabrication on Thomson’s part, and Blondel may be too ready to accept the story at face value. (Butts also refers to an otherwise unnoticed affair with Wyndham ...”

“... but owing something, I believe, to certain not dissimilar contortions in the work of his friend Anthony Powell. Here he is telling us the circumstances under which he allowed to go forward an absurd requisition for flying-helmets – 30,000 for a Fleet Air Arm that probably needed about a quarter of that number. ‘It is no defence,’ he writes, ‘to ...”

“... with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with ...”

“... Family Romance, but his philosophical writings are marked by that kind of sudden ‘turn’ which Forster used to such effect in dealing with the dramatic incidents that change his characters’ lives; and he likes to stop, as we say in the States, on a dime, ending his pieces abruptly, implying an abyss of thought beyond the point where his essay leaves ...”

“... as are made about the private lives of Harold and Vita, Somerset Maugham, Joe Orton and E.M. Forster add nothing that is new: they are informative but not titillating. On the other hand, the statement that Nancy Astor’s friendship with Lord Lothian was ‘always regarded as platonic’ is merely salacious innuendo: it is titillating but not ...”

“... promise, and never as it were challenging the life on its own separate terms. For this reason E.M. Forster, say, is not a cult writer, although he used to complain to people for whom ‘my works included me rather than I them’; and nor was Virginia Woolf. They have become themselves, whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like ...”

“... are, and they have come to dread the direct untreated response by their students, pronouncing E.M. Forster soppy, or Virginia Woolf a bit of a bitch. High-tech negates such responses, rescuing itself from social and worldly critical converse – the medium in which the novel naturally swims. To discuss in the old fashion the characters of War and Peace or Anna ...”

“... itself, of the adaptation by Christopher Hampton, and of the charismatic central performance by Anthony Sher – and partly due to the blushes of self-congratulation that suffuse the BBC when it oversteps its own maidenly limits in matters sexual and political. More than all this, Bradbury has written books of academic literary criticism. A brief canter ...”

“... Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Such connections ensured that he wrote many letters; he asked that they be destroyed after his death, but ...”

“... she should think: ‘Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.’ It’s not what E.M. Forster meant by ‘only connect,’ but it’s what I mean.These days ‘only connect’ means bumping elbows.7 May. Some time in the afternoon Alex Jennings and Lesley Moors call by and we have a socially distanced chat on the doorstep, me sitting on a ...”

“... Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the Crown, a testament to the uneasy. Forster-like imperial conscience of a pre-Thatcherite age. In foreign affairs, Mrs Thatcher’s experience was slight ... This is masterly. The introduction of Churchill in the second sentence prepares the reader for a reference back to the imperial ...”