“... This is what one would expect of such a group, though the three members she names are E.M. Forster (whose credentials are of course impeccable), Vyvyan Holland and Shaw himself. It was news to me that Vyvyan Holland, son of Oscar Wilde, was himself of homosexual persuasion. The inclusion of Shaw in the list for the purpose of establishing his own ...”

“... his own novel, though expertly crafted, is always mindful of the ordinary reader – the one E.M. Forster called ‘Uncle Harry’ – and is resolutely unbaffling. The relatively late Riceyman Steps (1923) showed that he could do doing pretty well if he chose; but he wrote bestsellers and Conrad did not. It once seemed that there was to be a major ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they can never be included. ‘How you bring out the horror of the English country house,’ E.M. Forster once wrote to her. ‘Were they ever not horrible?’ In this he was rather missing the point. For Rosamond the aristocracy were only half horrible: they were daunting but alluring, and it was the element of forbidden glamour that many of her readers ...”

“... the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward to.’ ‘Suffolk is supremely ...”

“... Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is recorded to have read is Lady Chatterley, from which, like the unlearned readers who ...”

“... but some have the capacity to fall in love with a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong. Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a ...”

“... boy, yet seems to have borne the culprit no ill-will. As time passed he came to admire E.M. Forster less and less, partly because the older man wasn’t as militant in the gay cause as he valuably could have been, partly because Forster’s own affairs were more discreetly dealt with – and, it may be, partly, though ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield's​  wonderfully wrong-headed criticism of E.M. Forster was that he was a dab hand at warming the pot, ‘but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ Readers of Hernan Diaz’s new novel get their first sniff of a tea bag about halfway through the book’s 400-odd pages. Trust is made up of four sections, the first presented as a complete novel (Bonds by Harold Vanner), the second as a draft memoir from the 1930s, both of them concerning a New York financier with a gift for reading and manipulating the market ...”

“... support of the powerful Duke of Rutland. Financially secure, he was at last able to marry Sarah Elmy, to whom he had been attached for the previous ten or more years. After The Village Crabbe published only one more work, The News-Paper (1785), before he left off writing poetry altogether for almost twenty years. In this period he devoted himself to his ...”

“... 9 seas that would have overwhelmed and sunk Stevenson’s crammed and puny emigrant ship. E.M. Forster famously remarked of America that it is like life in that ‘you can usually find in it what you look for.’ Settlers from Crèvecoeur – the ‘Mister Heartbreak’ of the title derives from Berryman’s witty Englishing of his name to Aldous ...”

“... the unruffled fat-cat image which he was to acquire. Their comments can be illuminating. E.M. Forster, though he could speak larkily about him and indeed once described him as naughty (not the adjective which would leap instantly to mind), never forgot that when the Great War ended Bridges ‘was the first person with any reputation to risk who said ...”

“... irritating, infuriating. What makes it so is the realisation that one just might be stupid. E.M. Forster, when asked a question of some complication, is supposed to have replied: ‘How do I know what I think until I write about it?’ I hope he did indeed say it, because it seems to me a very savvy statement, at any rate for people who write. For a real ...”

“... There are the Laureate’s critical opinions: ‘I can see no merit in Hardy’s poetry.’ E.M. Forster pops in and out of these pages, ‘wistful and attenuated, in a wide-brimmed black Italian hat’. There are a few good portraits of non-literary people, including Forster’s mother and the author’s own, and a vivid ...”

“... did not just speak Irish; they spoke it combatively, self-consciously, which is not quite how E.M. Forster spoke English. To be fluent in a particular national culture, yet to sidle up to it from the outside, was the peculiar privilege of Wilde, Yeats, Conrad, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Beckett, nomadic souls adrift between home and ...”