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“... and the finest critical intelligence, but lesser if still considerable writers, such as E.M. Forster (whose Aspects of the Novel has proved so strangely durable) and Ford Maddox Ford, may have much to offer. Ford’s chatty and opinionated The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (1930) contains many sweeping and unscholarly ...”

“... That E.M. Forster gave only two cheers for democracy, but three for D.H. Lawrence, on the occasion of Lawrence’s death, is well-known. Forster was upset that the lowbrows Lawrence scandalised had joined forces with the highbrows he bored to denigrate ‘the greatest imaginative novelist’ of his generation ...”

“... contribution to the canon. By far the best piece of writing in the central section is by E.M. Forster, Orwell’s most dedicated contributor. The homosexual author of A Passage to India (serialised in German radio broadcasts to India in 1940 as anti-British propaganda) and the homophobic author of Burmese Days found common cause in the country’s hour of ...”

“... held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on a spiritual life of its own’, being, in effect, worshipped, so that ‘long after its light was extinguished, memories of it glowed in the minds of men.’ A secular age still feels a need for the light that shines in the ...”

“... you really mean you would slog up here to have lunch with me’). Although Concerning E.M. Forster was published earlier this year and he’d been working on it for some time, the default suggestion when asked what he would like said about him in his contributor’s note was ‘FK exists in Cambridge.’ ‘Please use it again,’ he would say on the ...”

“... In 1929 E.M. Forster accompanied his close friend Florence Barger and her husband to a conference in South Africa, and kept a detailed journal of the two-month round trip. After the conference they left Pretoria to join a ship at the port of Beira in Mozambique: Levant at last – those trudging squares and triangles between houses that I remember from Port Said in 1912, a plank missing from the footbridge, natives grading into Portuguese without shame, a grilling sea-wall, its pavement burst up by the waves, houses built on white piles, with chickens ducks cookery and washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which he took out of the box at the beginning of the novel, and shut away again at the end. E.M. Forster spoke of round and flat characters, as if they were two types of doll; the flat ones could be made lifelike by shaking them vigorously. The gulf between childhood toys and adult reading is bridged by fantasy tales such as Pinocchio, where the puppet comes ...”

“... a relief from this was Forrest Reid, a novelist and critic in his late forties, admired by Yeats, Forster and Walter de la Mare, but almost ignored in his own city at that time. His family had belonged to the merchant class, who were relatively free of the political stubbornness which was extreme among the industrialists and their workers. He himself was ...”

“... industrial disputes. It grips like a thriller. It is partly the question – identified by E.M. Forster as a simple but fundamental aspect of the novel – of what happens next. Will other unions be drawn in? Will we be into power cuts by Christmas? What will Mrs Thatcher do then? It is partly – to take another of ...”

“... offers a safe niche where you can spend a quiet life classifying spiders, away from what E.M. Forster called the world of telegrams and anger. To the ambitious poor, science offers a way to fame or reasonable wealth that needs no starting capital other than good brains and prodigious energy. In answer to the question ‘What shall I do research ...”

“... were a reassurance and a bulwark, like sitting an exam with a lot of other candidates. (E.M. Forster liked to imagine novelists from all periods all writing together in the same room.) Conscious Modern (nothing to do with the Modernist movement of course) was much rarer because harder to do. A good writer in this genre, such as Martin Amis, succeeds in ...”

“... Passion and scholarship may enhance each other’s effects,’ E.M. Forster noted in his Commonplace Book with A.E. Housman in mind. Forster was always keen to reduce the incompatibles in life: Housman was less persuaded by such redemptive harmonies. He preferred the losing paradoxes to the winning ones: ‘ “Whoever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life shall find it ...”

“... give his prose the character of an ancient epic or saga. Even plodding passages, full of what E.M. Forster called ‘those dreadful Oriental names’, will suddenly break into images of great beauty that suggest far more than they state: ‘The sun was on the desert rim, a red ball without heat,’ ‘The wind blew cold off dark water and I heard waves lapping ...”

“... struggling for expression seems unmistakable now, but thousands of readers (though not E.M. Forster) missed it for decades. Anyone who wants to visit Sargeson’s house in the suburbs of Auckland can pick up the key from Takapuna Library and walk the short distance to 14a Esmonde Road. When Sargeson’s stolidly puritan parents bought their holiday bach ...”