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“... And that someone or something else may be – in fact is likely to be – of real value. When E.M. Forster said that he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country rather than his friend he was drawing our attention to the question of value, of what betrayal can protect. So we have to bear in mind what Judas might have been protecting – what values ...”

“... bad writing? But if Kipling or Wells might in their own ways have done Erewhon better, and E.M. Forster The Way of All Flesh, that does not affect Butler’s influence and individuality, his power to create himself as ‘master of his life’. It is significant that Virginia Woolf’s praise was for what was to become – had already become – the ...”

“... but on the writings of Macaulay, Emily Eden, Lady Canning, Bishop Heber, Kipling, Diana Cooper and Forster; and it comments, sometimes with disfavour, on films like Gandhi, The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown. If a book on this scale had been written by an American it would have carried acknowledgments to numerous funds and foundations for moneys ...”

“... his loose economic principles and his childlessness in the doctrine of present gratification; E.M. Forster could muster only two cheers for the democratic state, reserving three alone for ‘Love the Beloved Republic’. Subversive stuff, all this, to Professor Himmelfarb and to our own age of economic austerity, which seems to require a similar austerity in ...”

“... It is a dignified response to the patronising attitude of the British which so disgusted E.M. Forster when he went to Egypt less than two years after Sharif’s death. It is difficult not to be moved by the sheer commitment of this high-minded book. Perhaps it is too well-intentioned for its own good. It is full of political statements which are ...”

“... Schmidt’s or even the White Tower with the likes of Joe Ackerley, John Lehmann and, once, E.M. Forster. Though a virtual civilian, he remembers getting demobbed at Olympia, choosing from the millions of pinstriped suits and raincoats, one of which proved, in his thrifty hands and posh language, ‘longevous’. And I should like here to mention that about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... urge to continue work of that kind, though perfectly happy to go on writing non-fiction, like E.M. Forster. Of such cases there may be little of interest to say under the rubric of blockage, which implies some degree of distress; these writers may feel no pain at all. There are, however, various other forms of inhibition that are painful enough – induce, as ...”

“... historical world that it offers walk-on parts to actual persons, including Kingsley Amis, E.M. Forster, and the organiser of the 1980 Post-Impressionist exhibition. Still Life is nothing if not a capacious book, and whatever one makes of the Cambridge episodes, Byatt’s touch is marvellously sure when she comes to the less glamorous members of the Potter ...”

“... existed, apart from the great pines and lilacs which were there already, seems doubtful. E.M. Forster, who came as tutor to the children, declared that he could not find it. But it was certainly at Nasserheide that she created the new version of herself – witty, elegant, formidable, sensual, aristocratic, impayable. Resentment at her marriage and ...”

“... Scott’s greatest strength has to be accompanied by some fatuous judgments on other writers: E.M. Forster ‘unintelligent’, Evelyn Waugh ‘sugary’, Jane Austen ‘morally ambivalent’. There is also a stray facile comment on the work of Eric Quayle in exposing Scott’s financial sharp practice: ‘unconvincing’. It may not have convinced Mr ...”

“... of all kinds: in the summer of 1907 Elizabeth von Arnim took a large party, including E.M. Forster, through Sussex by caravan, while the Neo-Pagans were camping out in the New Forest. Even so, with the rent of his cottage ‘a quarterly worry’, Edward Thomas had to make ends meet with the reviewing he hated. It became an effort for him, by 1911, not ...”

“... friends to the People, though the friends had already defected to Moscow. ‘It was the old E.M. Forster thing,’ Catherine said. ‘Better to betray one’s country than one’s friend.’ She said she didn’t have Rees’s order of service and couldn’t remember if he had had a memorial or anything of that sort. ‘I suppose he would’ve done,’ she ...”

“... shop owner: ‘but the other two call him Maestro.’This made me think, naturally enough, of E.M. Forster; and then of the fact that we were about to undergo the annual garrulity of the Booker Prize for Fiction. Would Forster have won the Booker? In 1905, when he published Where angels fear to tread, he would have been up ...”

“... lies in the long runs of correspondence with Auden, Spender, Edward Upward, John Lehmann and E.M. Forster. Permanently out of town, sedate in his living habits and unhurried in his rate of literary production, Isherwood cultivated the anachronistic arts of correspondence and diary-keeping. Despite the fact that the bulk of his work remains unread or out of ...”