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“... attitudes displayed by the other subjects. Only the essay (by Peter Stansky) on how, in 1910, E.M. Forster came to terms with both his homosexuality and the success of Howards End seems to have strayed from some other enterprise. This last piece aside, the volume displays a greater coherence than the average Festschrift. The editors’ own interests seem to be ...”

“... She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los Angeles, where, as Mr Bogarde says ...”

“... and 1914, and it is impossible not to be interested in what Russell, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore made of each other. For another thing, some of them had an extraordinary impact on the intellectual and political life of Britain for much of the 20th century; philosophers still work in the shadow of Russell, Moore and ...”

“... which served some of the same purpose and was by no means purely gush. I wrote to him about E.M. Forster in the Seventies and received back a succession of letters. They were written on a plan of his own, according to which every word was underlined and then several more underlinings could be added for emphasis. They were, however, very good letters, not ...”

“... novelist of the future’. As a writer of fiction, Isherwood looked backwards, to E.M. Forster: ‘the only one who understands what a modern novel ought to be’. Forster, whom he met in 1932, ‘became one of the first and most important guru-figures in Isherwood’s life’. There were other, less orthodox ...”

“... its incredibility. We are a long way from the instantaneous scrubbing-out deaths of E.M. Forster, and further still from, say, Anita Brookner’s austere fables of how goodness will fail because it is too good to cope with bad, but when, at the close of the novel, Bernard opens a letter from Yolande and announces yet more ‘Very good news’, we ...”

“... editor in television. He hunted down giants for Monitor – Henry Moore, Sir Thomas Beecham, E.M. Forster, Max Ernst, Robert Graves. He had the fine, if expensive idea of filming the artist or administrator in a setting germane to his or her work. They went to Athens to profile Katina Paxinou, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to observe Rudolf Bing in ...”

“... in our sense: indeed it would have specifically disowned our use of the word. So would E.M. Forster, whom F.R. Leavis accused of ‘not knowing how serious he was’. And our trouble today may be that because we take seriousness seriously we take Bloomsbury too seriously. Virginia Woolf has become an icon, academically hagiographic. Lytton Strachey, on ...”

“... and Florence’s letters were not for burning. They might, after all, be worth something. Neither Emma nor Florence could come to terms with having the value of their lives measured by that of their husband. It is hard to know whether the first or second Mrs Hardy had the more doleful time. Emma is more mysterious. Already ...”

“... a relief to read eventful tales of suspense, surprise, excitement, mystery and catharsis. E.M. Forster was wrong to deprecate the ‘story’. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky had no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and yarns? Professor James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply ...”

“... pastoral space’ which it represented to an earlier generation of writers like E.M. Forster in The Longest Journey and Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. It was now ‘a battleground of major ideas and ideologies’, a place which reflected – and in some degree resisted – the gale force of social and intellectual change. ‘In ...”

“... This is what one would expect of such a group, though the three members she names are E.M. Forster (whose credentials are of course impeccable), Vyvyan Holland and Shaw himself. It was news to me that Vyvyan Holland, son of Oscar Wilde, was himself of homosexual persuasion. The inclusion of Shaw in the list for the purpose of establishing his own ...”

“... Solomon’s Mines takes the form mainly of exhaustingly oracular pronouncements: there is none of Forster’s anxiety, or Kipling’s affection. Foulata is a tribeswoman who falls in love with Good, and risks her life to save him. When she dies – the noble native woman always dies in Haggard – Quatermain feels ‘bound to say … that I consider her ...”

“... his own novel, though expertly crafted, is always mindful of the ordinary reader – the one E.M. Forster called ‘Uncle Harry’ – and is resolutely unbaffling. The relatively late Riceyman Steps (1923) showed that he could do doing pretty well if he chose; but he wrote bestsellers and Conrad did not. It once seemed that there was to be a major ...”

“... they can never be included. ‘How you bring out the horror of the English country house,’ E.M. Forster once wrote to her. ‘Were they ever not horrible?’ In this he was rather missing the point. For Rosamond the aristocracy were only half horrible: they were daunting but alluring, and it was the element of forbidden glamour that many of her readers ...”