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“... 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 ...”

“... people. They were people. I live among her and hers.In an early story called ‘On the Day E.M. Forster Died’, the middle-aged Mrs Smith is released from the great man’s influence. Sitting in the London Library, as is her habit when her three small children are at school, she has the idea for something like the quartet. It is the book that will contain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is recorded to have read is Lady Chatterley, from which, like the unlearned readers who ...”

“... the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward to.’ ‘Suffolk is supremely ...”

“... boy, yet seems to have borne the culprit no ill-will. As time passed he came to admire E.M. Forster less and less, partly because the older man wasn’t as militant in the gay cause as he valuably could have been, partly because Forster’s own affairs were more discreetly dealt with – and, it may be, partly, though ...”

“... but some have the capacity to fall in love with a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong. Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a ...”

“... 9 seas that would have overwhelmed and sunk Stevenson’s crammed and puny emigrant ship. E.M. Forster famously remarked of America that it is like life in that ‘you can usually find in it what you look for.’ Settlers from Crèvecoeur – the ‘Mister Heartbreak’ of the title derives from Berryman’s witty Englishing of his name to Aldous ...”

“... BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely national’. ‘Our culture,’ he said, ‘springs naturally from our way of looking at things: the English countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair ...”

“... whereas it went almost without saying that Frieda was by contrast every inch an aristocrat. E.M. Forster called him ‘a sandy-haired passionate Nibelung’. People were astonished that he scrupulously cleaned the house and washed the dishes – his pleasure in domestic tasks was to them more surprising than his habit of beating his wife and making what ...”

“... support of the powerful Duke of Rutland. Financially secure, he was at last able to marry Sarah Elmy, to whom he had been attached for the previous ten or more years. After The Village Crabbe published only one more work, The News-Paper (1785), before he left off writing poetry altogether for almost twenty years. In this period he devoted himself to his ...”

“... by the work of other European modernists, not only Auden and Isherwood, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, but Proust and Gide, Thomas Mann, Musil and Hesse. Trapped in the tortuous syntax of a patriarchal society, their texts enact a struggle for emotional expression which is all the more impressive for its ambiguity. Resistance is the matrix of ...”

“... irritating, infuriating. What makes it so is the realisation that one just might be stupid. E.M. Forster, when asked a question of some complication, is supposed to have replied: ‘How do I know what I think until I write about it?’ I hope he did indeed say it, because it seems to me a very savvy statement, at any rate for people who write. For a real ...”

“... There are the Laureate’s critical opinions: ‘I can see no merit in Hardy’s poetry.’ E.M. Forster pops in and out of these pages, ‘wistful and attenuated, in a wide-brimmed black Italian hat’. There are a few good portraits of non-literary people, including Forster’s mother and the author’s own, and a vivid ...”

“... questions of common life, deeply rooted in its past and in its green and pleasant land. From E.M. Forster (‘in these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole’) to Stanley Baldwin (‘England is the country and the country is England’), this vision has helped shape 20th-century literature, politics and national life. It ...”