Golden England

Martin Wiener, 3 December 1981

Condition of England 
by Lincoln Allison.
Junction, 221 pp., £12.50, August 1981, 0 86245 032 2
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... questions of common life, deeply rooted in its past and in its green and pleasant land. From E.M. Forster (‘in these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole’) to Stanley Baldwin (‘England is the country and the country is England’), this vision has helped shape 20th-century literature, politics and national life. It ...

Made in Heaven

Frank Kermode, 10 November 1994

Frieda Lawrence 
by Rosie Jackson.
Pandora, 240 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 9780044409151
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The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence 
by Brenda Maddox.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 631 pp., £20, August 1994, 1 85619 243 1
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Kangaroo 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Bruce Steele.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £60, August 1994, 0 521 38455 9
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Twilight in Italy and Other Essays 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Paul Eggert.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £55, August 1994, 0 521 26888 5
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... whereas it went almost without saying that Frieda was by contrast every inch an aristocrat. E.M. Forster called him ‘a sandy-haired passionate Nibelung’. People were astonished that he scrupulously cleaned the house and washed the dishes – his pleasure in domestic tasks was to them more surprising than his habit of beating his wife and making what ...

Wonderland

Edward Timms, 17 March 1988

The Temple 
by Stephen Spender.
Faber, 210 pp., £10.95, February 1988, 0 571 14785 2
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... by the work of other European modernists, not only Auden and Isherwood, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, but Proust and Gide, Thomas Mann, Musil and Hesse. Trapped in the tortuous syntax of a patriarchal society, their texts enact a struggle for emotional expression which is all the more impressive for its ambiguity. Resistance is the matrix of ...

Fs and Bs

Nicholas Hiley, 9 March 1995

Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen 
by Adrian Weale.
Weidenfeld, 230 pp., £18.99, May 1994, 0 297 81488 5
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In from the Cold: National Security and Parliamentary Democracy 
by Laurence Lustgarten and Ian Leigh.
Oxford, 554 pp., £22.50, July 1994, 9780198252344
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... BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely national’. ‘Our culture,’ he said, ‘springs naturally from our way of looking at things: the English countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair ...

After-Time

Christopher Hitchens, 19 October 1995

Palimpsest: A Memoir 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 432 pp., £17.99, October 1995, 0 233 98891 2
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... them the first time. Of a disastrous visit to Cambridge, provoked by an invitation from E.M. Forster that had been meant for Tennessee Williams:Forster’s look of disappointment was disheartening. But, dutifully, he took me on a tour. We crossed the river to the chapel, which I coldly termed ‘pretty’, thus ...

Memories of Frank Kermode

Stefan Collini, Karl Miller, Adam Phillips, Jacqueline Rose, James Wood, Michael Wood and Wynne Godley, 23 September 2010

... to it in The Art of Telling, and near the end of his life in work on Ford Madox Ford and E.M. Forster. He wanted to push this mid-century French tussle between realists and anti-realists back a bit, into modernism; it was as if he was finding, in the absence of major British postmodern examples, the modernist precursors to Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet. And ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Finding My Métier, 4 January 2018

... indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury (though whether in the person of G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster or the sainted Virginia herself I’m not sure), whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and ever’, which, lolling about on the sun-baked lawns, these gorgeous creatures are indeed subscribing to (and possibly finding wanting). Walberswick was ...

Urning

Colm Tóibín: The revolutionary Edward Carpenter, 29 January 2009

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Verso, 565 pp., £24.99, October 2008, 978 1 84467 295 0
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... a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new possibilities for human freedom. In the middle of all this wandered the poet, socialist, free-thinker and sexual rebel Edward Carpenter, who became one of the most influential ...

C (for Crisis)

Eric Hobsbawm: The 1930s, 6 August 2009

The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars 
by Richard Overy.
Allen Lane, 522 pp., £25, May 2009, 978 0 7139 9563 3
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... Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... source is the contemporary novel. Again and again he mines Arnold Bennett, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster, Wells and Galsworthy for material, and takes their social criticism at face value.Is it wise to rely so heavily on these novelists’ arguments in constructing a moral critique? In every era writers can be found condemning the money-worship, tawdriness ...
Joseph Conrad: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Murray, 320 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 7195 4910 8
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Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper 
by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan.
Oxford, 218 pp., £30, August 1991, 9780198117858
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... adjective to go with it. The assumption behind the readings makes a neat little summation of what E.M  Forster called the ‘misty’ side of Conrad and the writer who was a practical seaman. Of course the combination made his genius what it was, but none the less there remains a distinct gap between the two Conrads: the writer and the ...

Manliness

D.A.N. Jones, 20 December 1984

Last Ferry to Manly 
by Jill Neville.
Penguin, 165 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 14 007068 0
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Down from the Hill 
by Alan Sillitoe.
Granada, 218 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 246 12517 9
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God Knows 
by Joseph Heller.
Cape, 353 pp., £8.95, November 1984, 0 224 02288 1
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Wilt on High 
by Tom Sharpe.
Secker, 236 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 9780436458118
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... attempts to teach English to a murderous drug peddler in the local jail: this man dislikes E.M. Forster on the ground that ‘he lived with a pig’ (P.C. Buckingham), but this is the least of the convict’s faults. A local policeman who hates Wilt makes use of his relationship with the convict in order to deceive a rival policeman into supposing that Wilt ...

Nudge-Winking

Terry Eagleton: T.S. Eliot’s Politics, 19 September 2002

The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain 
by Jason Harding.
Oxford, 250 pp., £35, April 2002, 9780199247172
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... passed-over. The Criterion pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of provincialism. If the journal espoused an ...

A Spot of Firm Government

Terry Eagleton: Claude Rawson, 23 August 2001

God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 
by Claude Rawson.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, June 2001, 0 19 818425 5
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... in Anglo-Saxon culture only through the sights of a rifle or at the end of a sherry decanter. E.M. Forster had it both ways, allowing his bogusly emancipated reader to feel superiorly satirical about the redneck English while suddenly unmasking foreignness as a genuine threat, and so sending up liberals like himself into the bargain. But the days when any ...

Yes and No

John Bayley, 24 July 1986

Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism 
by Mark Krupnick.
Northwestern, 207 pp., $25.95, April 1986, 0 8101 0712 0
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... rest than in the company of cool, humouring, compassionate observers like Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, or of Lionel Trilling himself? Naturally if you write as if present and past were one, you tend to write about purely notional things and people; like Matthew Arnold, you attach your imagination to the idea. And since ideas are bloodless you run the risk ...