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“... 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 ...”

“... Nine Lessons and Carols during the darkest days of the war along with Dadie Rylands, perhaps, E.M. Forster and Maynard Keynes. As it was, come 1941 and all I was doing was giving my shepherd abiding in the fields in the Upper Armley National School nativity play.27 November. The wife of Nicholas Farrell is having a baby and it had been agreed before ...”

“... without them, what kind of life will you live? Despite its limitations, Alexandria – which E.M. Forster once described as a city ‘founded upon cotton, with the concurrence of onions and eggs, ill built, ill planned, ill drained’ – holds the promise without which Cavafy could not live, even though it would culminate in betrayal and ...”

“... with Wilson’s new canonisation is the showing in London of Merchant-Ivory’s film adaptation of E.M  Forster’s Howard’s End, and a new novel from Ian McEwan. To a reader of First Love, Last Rites or In Between the Sheets it will seem an odd conjunction. Nevertheless, it is to Wilson’s implicit prescription that McEwan’s novels seem increasingly ...”

“... have been a doctor or a lawyer,’ he was particularly annoyed by indolent celebrities – E.M. Forster was one offender – who didn’t go out of their way to stun by weight. As someone who preferred to end his short stories ‘with a full-stop rather than with a straggle of dots’, he also grew impatient with writers who ‘give you the materials for a ...”

“... some is the exploitation of others, so that truly self-consistent liberals, the Thomas Manns and E.M Forsters of this world, must acknowledge the tainted roots of their own liberties. Besides, it is implausible to imagine in a post-Freudian age that the obstacles to our self-realisation are all conveniently on the outside. If they were simply that, we might ...”

“... disowned. ‘We must love one another or die,’ he had written, a sentiment much admired by E.M. Forster among others, but, as Auden later told the story, he quickly realised ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway’: so he changed it to ‘We must love one another and die,’ which is hardly worth saying; then he decided to cut the stanza; and then he ...”

“... Years A-Growing, written in Irish and published in English in 1933 with an introduction by E.M. Forster, saw similarities between Homer and the Blasket autobiographies. Their achievement was, he said, ‘something new in Irish literature’.And yet there had been no break with the past. What these writers did was to weave their autobiographical tales, told ...”

“... in a perhaps only slightly complex tone) produced like a rabbit out of a hat a friend of E.M. Forster’s, who happened to be slight in physical build, though surely large in moral stature. Carpenter describes the ceremony in cool flat prose, the huge bride and tiny groom, the splendid bouquet and the amazed registrar, and Auden buying everyone large ...”

“... in our 1965 spring tour, he scribbled it on a cheerful self-introductory note thrust under E.M. Forster’s door. Forster later inquired: ‘Is the fellow mad?’ When Ginsberg heard this, he thought it was flattering. In Howl, we recall, it is precisely the madness of the Beat generation’s ‘best ...”

“... wealth – having it or losing it or wanting even more of it – can do to them. He was, in E.M. Forster’s phrase, ‘a foreigner in a front seat’, ‘well-placed for observing the airs and graces of the great’. The Sturgises were themselves a wealthy Boston family – James had been a friend of Howard’s father, Russell, who was the head of Barings ...”

“... and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of sticky passages in E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View and The Longest Journey. Forster, too, was a great admirer of The Way of All Flesh, about which there was nothing in the least sentimental. So quickly can emancipation become overripe. Yet ...”