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“... as a cautionary episode in a treatise such as that of Priestley’s replacement Johann Reinhold Forster, whose account of Cook’s second voyage was a synthesis of late 18th-century natural history, scholarship and creative imagination, and included several pages on Priestley’s virtues as chemist and physician. Perhaps Priestley’s death would have been ...”

“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... that orthodoxy calls most persuasively to those who know, as Christ told the woman of Samaria in John 4.10, that there is no living water in this life. Eliot could state this perception without complaint, and even joke about it in his sober way. He tells his brother about ‘the kink in my brain which makes life at all an unremitting strain for me, and which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed ...”

“... Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Such connections ensured that he wrote many letters; he asked that they be destroyed after his death, but ...”

“... partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a daughter; Smith was ...”

“... The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot appeared at the end of 1935, not quite three years after its subject’s death, and must be one of the very last examples of what was by that time a gravely endangered species. In the preface to Eminent Victorians Strachey had wittily mocked the solemn pretensions of the Victorian and Edwardian monumental biography, ponderously discreet as an old-fashioned manservant: but 17 years later Marrot found it still possible to produce a work of unblushing hagiography ...”

“... literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight Macdonald were among the many writers active on the anti-Stalinist left who were in conflict with the League. Partisan Review posed a series of questions challenging ...”

“... of Strangers (1981), can be seen as an attempt to balance the irrational and the rational: what Forster called the ‘low atavistic form’ of storytelling with a larger explanatory context – social, historical or scientific. There’s a passage in McEwan’s spy novel Sweet Tooth (2012), a light but compelling box of tricks, in which an author who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the letdowns of arrival – in modern terms, couldn’t stop playing with his signifier – Forster’s Mrs Moore remains convinced that there is a real India to make her passage to, Conrad’s Marlow knows there’s a heart of darkness worth all the tourist’s little tribulations. From Wordsworth’s daffodils to Hughes’s brutal snowdrops, objects ...”

“... born towards the end of the century’. And while he’s very good on the Hampshire history – John Tyndall, Tennyson, Allen’s radical fiction – it doesn’t tell us much about Thompson. The fact that Austen’s Chawton was ‘just twenty miles away’ hardly seems impressive – it’s unlikely Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly ...”

“... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...”