Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the unruffled fat-cat image which he was to acquire. Their comments can be illuminating. E.M. Forster, though he could speak larkily about him and indeed once described him as naughty (not the adjective which would leap instantly to mind), never forgot that when the Great War ended Bridges ‘was the first person with any reputation to risk who said ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield's​  wonderfully wrong-headed criticism of E.M. Forster was that he was a dab hand at warming the pot, ‘but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ Readers of Hernan Diaz’s new novel get their first sniff of a tea bag about halfway through the book’s 400-odd pages. Trust is made up of four sections, the first presented as a complete novel (Bonds by Harold Vanner), the second as a draft memoir from the 1930s, both of them concerning a New York financier with a gift for reading and manipulating the market ...”

“... did not just speak Irish; they spoke it combatively, self-consciously, which is not quite how E.M. Forster spoke English. To be fluent in a particular national culture, yet to sidle up to it from the outside, was the peculiar privilege of Wilde, Yeats, Conrad, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Beckett, nomadic souls adrift between home and ...”