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“... there were normally eight lectures, enough for a book – for example, in the following year E.M. Forster gave the lectures that made up Aspects of the Novel. Ronald Schuchard, the present editor, is naturally curious as to why a 37-year-old American, a banker, and, as a critic, practised in the journalistic essay rather than the full-scale academic ...”

“... James is much more? Even that there is distress, irony, doubt and mystery in the voice of E.M. Forster that these films miss? Thomson’s anti-middlebrow fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this ...”

“... in his writing, but when talking – belittling women writers, African novelists, disparaging E.M. Forster, saying that Princess Anne’s daughter has ‘a criminal face’ – he was often possessed by a foul mood. It was in such a mood that he rejected me, in 1996, and I wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow. Because the friendship was over I was better able to assess ...”

“... But for all its pretensions at subtlety, a lot of non-genre fiction does much the same. E.M. Forster in Howards End: ‘He was dark, clean-shaven and accustomed to command.’ At their most minimal, these labels are only really there to help the reader keep track of who’s who: ‘the redhead’, ‘the dark-haired fellow’. Any descriptor will do, so ...”

“... this was the problem in 1889; John Addington Symonds thought it was the problem in 1891; and E.M. Forster was convinced in 1960 that if homosexuality could be legalised ‘overnight’ without debate, it would cause little bother. Homosexuality was a well-known social reality, framed in the language of everyday life and in the language of the law (which was ...”

“... conclusion would seem to be, Meredith has not worn well.’ In that essay Woolf quoted E.M. Forster, who, the year before, had despatched Meredith in Aspects of the Novel with a dig at ‘the home counties posing as the universe’ and the final verdict that Meredith ‘now lies in the trough’ – an especially telling demolition, as Leavis ...”

“... hard-headed realism. On the journey back he finished an essay, ‘War and Peace: A Letter to E.M. Forster’, which makes clear his admiration of what he saw as the military virtues: ‘this submission of the intelligence to facts and of facts to the resources of the intelligence’. Mainly, the essay just shows that he’d already decided to go, but that, as ...”

“... teapots so hard because they were to be smashed.’ In fact, one of the few limitations E.M. Forster places on Woolf in the lecture he gave in 1941, after her death, was that she would have been unable to take the measure, for her fiction, of London bombed out in the Blitz: ‘The submarine perhaps. But not the flying fortress or the land mine. The idea ...”

“... not locked into any kind of dress-suit that the prose can wave its arms and ball its fists. E.M. Forster, so loyal to Lawrence, is constrained, and his writing, even at its finest, has more or less the kind of liberty that one expects to find within constraint. But Lawrence is unaccountable. Christmas roses, ‘the lovely buds like handfuls of ...”

“... and recedings of a philosophical nature. The death of D.H. Lawrence in 1930 moved E.M. Forster ‘to say straight out that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.’ Whereupon T.S. Eliot’s philosophical proclivities notoriously encouraged him to speak in a certain way: ‘The virtue of speaking out is somewhat diminished if ...”

“... but we can see him achieving a somewhat similar effect by different means in his salute to E.M. Forster on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1962. Other, louder, writers may have tried to ‘impose themselves’, Pritchett writes, whereas ‘Forster has interposed and influenced by a misleading slackness, by the ...”

“... for a first time some three years into their correspondence proper, a relieved Flaubert wrote to Edma Roger des Genettes: My illustrious friend left me on Saturday evening. Never was there a better woman, more good-natured and less of a bluestocking. She worked all day, and in the evenings we chattered like magpies till three in the morning. Though she’s ...”

“... also a failure to appreciate her intelligence: ‘How we all used to underestimate her,’ E.M. Forster had the decency to write with hindsight. If Lopokova was hurt by this she said little about it; her letters are remarkably uncatty. At Charleston she often found better company in the kitchen with Grace Germany, Vanessa’s housekeeper, or with the ...”

“... admitted by Matthew Arnold, and later, permissive notions of the novel as a ‘spongy tract’ (Forster) or large loose bag into which anything would fit. Obviously novels of the old, discredited schools – the historical novel, the novel of adventure, the soap-box or pulpit novel – continued and continue to be written despite the lesson of the ...”

“... nor savage enough to carry it off; and any novel must stagger under the burden of a hero called Esme Sa Foy. The best bit is the preface, which includes some interesting sidelights. What looks like a flat pastiche of Decline and Fall is actually social realism. The author really did do such a tutoring job, to make money to pay his college bills; and the ...”