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“... them the first time. Of a disastrous visit to Cambridge, provoked by an invitation from E.M. Forster that had been meant for Tennessee Williams:Forster’s look of disappointment was disheartening. But, dutifully, he took me on a tour. We crossed the river to the chapel, which I coldly termed ‘pretty’, thus ...”

“... to it in The Art of Telling, and near the end of his life in work on Ford Madox Ford and E.M. Forster. He wanted to push this mid-century French tussle between realists and anti-realists back a bit, into modernism; it was as if he was finding, in the absence of major British postmodern examples, the modernist precursors to Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet. And ...”

“... indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury (though whether in the person of G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster or the sainted Virginia herself I’m not sure), whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and ever’, which, lolling about on the sun-baked lawns, these gorgeous creatures are indeed subscribing to (and possibly finding wanting). Walberswick was ...”

“... a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new possibilities for human freedom. In the middle of all this wandered the poet, socialist, free-thinker and sexual rebel Edward Carpenter, who became one of the most influential ...”

“... adjective to go with it. The assumption behind the readings makes a neat little summation of what E.M  Forster called the ‘misty’ side of Conrad and the writer who was a practical seaman. Of course the combination made his genius what it was, but none the less there remains a distinct gap between the two Conrads: the writer and the ...”

“... attempts to teach English to a murderous drug peddler in the local jail: this man dislikes E.M. Forster on the ground that ‘he lived with a pig’ (P.C. Buckingham), but this is the least of the convict’s faults. A local policeman who hates Wilt makes use of his relationship with the convict in order to deceive a rival policeman into supposing that Wilt ...”

“... in Anglo-Saxon culture only through the sights of a rifle or at the end of a sherry decanter. E.M. Forster had it both ways, allowing his bogusly emancipated reader to feel superiorly satirical about the redneck English while suddenly unmasking foreignness as a genuine threat, and so sending up liberals like himself into the bargain. But the days when any ...”

“... Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur ...”

“... passed-over. The Criterion pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of provincialism. If the journal espoused an ...”

“... source is the contemporary novel. Again and again he mines Arnold Bennett, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster, Wells and Galsworthy for material, and takes their social criticism at face value.Is it wise to rely so heavily on these novelists’ arguments in constructing a moral critique? In every era writers can be found condemning the money-worship, tawdriness ...”

“... rest than in the company of cool, humouring, compassionate observers like Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, or of Lionel Trilling himself? Naturally if you write as if present and past were one, you tend to write about purely notional things and people; like Matthew Arnold, you attach your imagination to the idea. And since ideas are bloodless you run the risk ...”

“... Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In Abinger Harvest E.M. Forster had the idea of doing a kind of anonymous life of a young man in Regency London, quoting Keats’s letters and describing his hopes and fears and his family and financial troubles, but not mentioning him by name. It brought the actual Keats, before the ...”

“... ultimate evil was to be a fink. With Judas haunting the debate, it’s as well to be careful. E.M. Forster hoped that he’d have the courage to betray his country rather than his friend. But doesn’t it depend on the country and the cause? Finking on Jesus was a pretty bad idea, except as part of the Almighty’s inscrutable plan: but how about finking on ...”

“... boat-train in London. Isherwood’s mother and his friend are crying, Isherwood is crying, E.M. Forster is asking whether he should join the Communist Party (‘I forget what I answered. I think it was “No” ’). As the train pulled out, there was nasty sharp wrench, and then, as always when I am the traveller, a quick upsurge of guilty relief. Auden ...”

“... relatively trivial things. As his titles indicate, he deals with states rather than plots. E.M. Forster once complained that most of life is so dull that nothing can be said about it, but for Green that is never the case. Some of the pieces in Surviving deal with tiny incidents, on the bus or in the pub, that other writers would never bother with. Long ...”