“... 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 ...”

“... to longer pieces like Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (which took nine months to print) and E.M. Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon (eighty pages) – demonstrates a capacity for care, patience and precision that should not be taken for granted. Printing, if one is to do it with any competence, has to become part of one’s life.On the afternoon of 25 January ...”

“... more advanced positions, as does a readiness to imagine the repugnance of others. Even E.M. Forster writes, in 1953, that ‘the great majority of people are naturally repelled by the subject.’Among the forgotten multitudes resurrected by Parker are some appealing characters. I especially enjoyed PC Butcher, one of two plainclothes constables who gave ...”

“... as controls a small group of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects ...”

“... about this; but though she had equerries who were in the Guards she hardly felt able to ask. E.M. Forster figured in the book, with whom she remembered spending an awkward half hour when she invested him with the CH. Mouselike and shy he had said little and in such a small voice she had found him almost impossible to communicate with. Still, he was a bit of a ...”

“... What counts as a novel? Any ‘fictitious prose work’ over fifty thousand words was E.M. Forster’s answer, in Aspects of the Novel. It’s a broad enough definition, in all conscience, though it has begun to do some useful work by excluding a wide variety of short fiction in prose, and some long poems, such as Eugene Onegin or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems ...”

“... Malcolm ponders the last-mentioned syndrome:Unlike the flat characters of fiction (as E.M. Forster called them), who have no existence outside the novel they were invented to animate, the flat characters of biography are actual, three-dimensional people. But the biographer is writing a life not lives, and to keep himself on course, must cultivate a ...”

“... rebellious Davina in that ominous short tale ‘The Disinherited’; the insatiably romantic Emma of the story ‘Summer Night’; the dithering, self-distrusting, introspective Sydney Warren of Bowen’s very first novel, The Hotel, a prentice work memorable nearly half a century later if only because it shows in bud her later sophistication, relentless ...”

“... it mean that they were never worth bothering about at all? This was presumably what caused E.M. Forster’s first reaction to the book: he said it insulted the universe, meaning that it insulted the heart of man. Kenner thought they both deserved all they got, for being heretics, so he was pleased by the ending, though he made the same error. Budgen ...”