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“... so named throughout the book. Even on the thousandth repetition it still seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank was quite a close friend of Forster’s, and undoubtedly called him ‘Morgan’; his book of course benefits greatly from his personal ...”

“... that recalls the reader to a sense of what this man’s life is about. The first is to P.N. Furbank: If there seems time, I want to tell you of a strong experience or rather re-experience that I have just had. I am destroying or rearranging letters, and came across those from Mohammed el Adl – I may not even have mentioned his name to you, he was a ...”

“... working-class policeman’s life has been published and quite heavily promoted. In a foreword P.N. Furbank discusses Daley’s connections with Forster and other gay writers, but literary readers may be disappointed to discover that Daley’s book does not refer to these connections at all. Daley mentions Forster’s name only once, when he is discussing his ...”

“... lives of those dependent on him, did no damage to his poems, or to his novels and stories. P.N. Furbank, that admirably just and low-voiced critic, may be thought to spike this enterprise before it starts when he demurely remarks, of one of the books he has to review for the Annual: ‘Here again are efforts to justify Hardy’s archaisms, but always – as ...”

“... adultery to agriculture.’ More recently, in their book The Canonisation of Defoe (1988) P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens have argued – persuasively, in my view – that the traditional check-list of Defoe’s output may considerably exaggerate the number of items written by him. Backscheider appears unhappy at this revisionist attempt to cut her author down ...”

“... that have influenced me’. There is more than a touch of it in The Celestial Omnibus, and P.N. Furbank remarks of Howards End that ‘the Schlegel frankness about money that so shocks the Wilcoxes owed much to Butler.’ Old Mr Emerson in A Room with a View may well be based on him, while Felix Bacon in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s More Women than Men is ...”

“... and the everyday offhandedly together. In an anecdotal chapter on Angus Wilson, P.N. Furbank quotes a similar passage from his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, in which a bossy woman hectors a small boy, ‘so creating a deep psychic trauma that was to cause him to be court-martialled for cowardice many years later in World War Three’. The stiff upper ...”

“... Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on ...”

“... into a field, and, click! it would at once become radiant with bovine life.’ In his Life, P.N. Furbank takes Forster’s professions of inability to follow abstract arguments so seriously as to suggest that his inattention to the discussions ‘helps to explain, what might appear puzzling, how it is that the problem which Ansell and his friends are ...”

“... in the diary, its most revealing formulations about his earlier life, were to be deployed by P.N. Furbank in his marvellous biography of 1977-78, where they are balanced by a subtle portrait of Forster as Furbank knew him in his last two decades. They have become axiomatic in our understanding of Forster, and Wendy ...”

“... This new issue of Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain is very pretty. It is a glossy book, lavishly illustrated with 18th-century maps, portraits, landscapes, prospects of towns and representations of buildings, markets, ships. This is obviously meant to function as a coffee-table book, or as a book to put in the back of a car (along with the National Trust’s guides ...”

“... Read in this light, Confessions of Zeno is a darker book than it has sometimes seemed. P.N. Furbank, who wrote so intelligently about Svevo in Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966), suggests that Joyce and Svevo ‘not only celebrated the bourgeois as hero, they cheerfully identified themselves with him’. But Svevo, a writer in a businessman’s ...”

“... The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge – it is reprinted in W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank’s excellent eight-volume edition of his political and economic writings. With cleverly recessive irony Defoe says that Love was beheaded ‘for the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the ...”