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“... with a calm savagery and clear-eyed shamelessness that reject self-pity and special pleading. E.M. Forster, who knew his way about this adolescent crisis, but who believed there could be beneficent muddles as well as vicious ones, seems actually to have thought Denton Welch too much in control and deficient in muddle. On reading Maiden Voyage, he wrote Welch ...”

“... their identities in spite of being made of words and shifted from story to story. It is as if Emma Bovary were to show up in Anna Karenina’s Petersburg with all her memories of Yonville and Rouen intact. Behind the apparent claim that she was a disseminated textual creature would be a strong implicit argument that she was real enough to resist ...”

“... letter of encouragement about Maiden Voyage from Edith Sitwell, and a ‘fine letter’ from E.M. Forster, ‘full of very sensible praise of the book’. Sitwell urged him to do something quite different next time, something not introspective but ‘violent and vulgar’, while Forster privately decided he would never be ...”

“... positively known to have been available in the period for making a claim of gay identity: in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913-14, the title character identifies himself as ‘an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’. In this context, the nephew’s riposte is the more startling: ‘If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.’ Both of these ...”

“... Charles Ryder to visit his old nanny at Brideshead, where the two climbed ‘uncarpeted, scrubbed elm stairs, followed more passages, covered with linoleum ... up a final staircase, gated at the head. Here were the nurseries.’ The nurseries! The grand calm of that plural has a magniloquence all the more comic for sounding so self-assured. Here is the old ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have escaped such an audience as this that Sex played a large part in my uncle’s life.’ E.M. Forster was addressing an early meeting of the Bloomsbury Group’s Memoir Club, and was reading a paper about his closest male relation, the disliked, unmissed and now dead Uncle Willie. The evidence for Sex lay somewhere in William ...”

“... of Lost Years. And the only authority that is affectionately embraced in the book is E.M. Forster. Christopher was still a little in awe of him. Not because he thought of Forster as a great writer and as his particular master – he did, but this didn’t make him uneasy in ...”

“... he does not appear to have realised what an intolerable person he was.’ On the other hand, E.M. Forster moaned about his terrible experiences at public school and wished he hadn’t been educated with the sons of gentlemen, so Carey speculates as to what might have happened if the novelist had gone to school with the children of decent ...”

“... the work of this superb writer. In view of Naipaul’s recently expressed opinion of E.M. Forster, it occurs to me to compare this moment with the scene of the trial in A Passage to India: after the uproar the punkah wallah continues to pull the cord of his punkah, ‘unaware that anything unusual had occurred’. For he was untouchable though ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Trilling, whose commitment to the British liberal tradition is reflected in his book on E.M. Forster, became a good friend, as did Kenneth Burke, whose subtle critical mind abhorred any political sloganising. But the League of American Writers remained a constant and increasingly disturbing presence. The great change in the League’s position came in ...”

“... and Virginia Woolf was not the feminist idol she has since become. The reputation of E.M. Forster was in decline. The paintings of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were not privately collected and had been demoted to the cellars of many public galleries. The art criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell was no longer considered significant, and few people ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to believe that The Principle of Duty was the work of some autodidact unkindly imagined by E.M. Forster. Its rebarbative quality is exacerbated by Selbourne’s ostentatious contempt for his intellectual betters and a degree of self-regard that the author of a much better book than this would have no title to. ‘Given the scale of the moral and social ...”