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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”