“... The Woman in White. It has often been considered a low motivation. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster wrote that a story was not so much the backbone of a novel as its tapeworm, and suggested that the proper way to concede that a novel ought to tell one is ‘in a sort of drooping regretful voice’. It is doubtful that Collins felt the same ...”

“... and journalist whose range extended from Good Housekeeping to an essay on the work of E.M. Forster, a book on Some Religious Elements in English Literature and a biography of Milton. Like her ancestor Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England was intended to appeal to the common reader (and particularly to women), she disliked intellectual ...”

“... relatively trivial things. As his titles indicate, he deals with states rather than plots. E.M. Forster once complained that most of life is so dull that nothing can be said about it, but for Green that is never the case. Some of the pieces in Surviving deal with tiny incidents, on the bus or in the pub, that other writers would never bother with. Long ...”

“... both Bellow and F.O. Matthiessen. But being in America occasioned a retreat into Englishness: E.M. Forster was the guiding spirit of On Beauty, though it was largely set in the US. It won her the Orange Prize and got her many emails telling her she didn’t know how Americans speak. By this time she was writing essays in the New York Review of Books and soon a ...”

“... and small discomforts, precisely depicted. Some 1939 reviewers were infuriated, among them E.M. Forster, who dilated on the contrived snobbery of the professional classes. ‘She is always so smug, so right,’ wrote M.F. Savory of Worthing in a letter to the Times; ‘the only thing for Mrs Miniver is a direct hit from a bomb.’ Timing, however, was ...”

“... ultimate evil was to be a fink. With Judas haunting the debate, it’s as well to be careful. E.M. Forster hoped that he’d have the courage to betray his country rather than his friend. But doesn’t it depend on the country and the cause? Finking on Jesus was a pretty bad idea, except as part of the Almighty’s inscrutable plan: but how about finking on ...”

“... Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In Abinger Harvest E.M. Forster had the idea of doing a kind of anonymous life of a young man in Regency London, quoting Keats’s letters and describing his hopes and fears and his family and financial troubles, but not mentioning him by name. It brought the actual Keats, before the ...”

“... boat-train in London. Isherwood’s mother and his friend are crying, Isherwood is crying, E.M. Forster is asking whether he should join the Communist Party (‘I forget what I answered. I think it was “No” ’). As the train pulled out, there was nasty sharp wrench, and then, as always when I am the traveller, a quick upsurge of guilty relief. Auden ...”

“... his editor Jason Epstein, conversations with his Roman neighbour Italo Calvino, lunch with E.M. Forster, chat with Princess Margaret. But in Rome there were only months of reading, and Old Glory. Few people have identified themselves as closely with the history of their own country as Vidal has – General de Gaulle maybe. In Italy, he began his series of ...”

“... great are delineated for posterity by the Chronicle. Balanchine, Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s ...”

“... her grown-up daughters, whom she walked out on to have an affair with a famous scholar of E.M. Forster. Squeezing mud and seawater out of the doll, she starts thinking about her pregnancies, whereupon the doll disgorges a worm. ‘It seemed to me that something was no longer functioning in the organisation of internal and external,’ Elena Greco says of ...”

“... Military Cross-winning hero of the Somme – ‘she was a brave little soldier’). E.M. Forster talked to Donald Maclean, who is believed to have spent his last night in England at Muriel’s with Guy Burgess. Some people were only half-naturals for membership, like Princess Margaret, who hated to miss out on a binge. According to Ian Board, after ...”

“... recently been reissued,* is much more complete than Hyde, though not without cuts of its own. E.M. Forster was one of the best witnesses at the Chatterley trial; twenty-five years earlier, speaking of ‘Liberty in England’ (read it to see how little has changed), he protested the suppression of James Hanley’s Boy. I had assumed that Boy was condemned as a ...”

“... author and subsequently poetry editor for Dent. This leads him into a fierce attack on E.M. Forster for his supposedly condescending portrait of Leonard Bast in Howards End. He quotes one of Cardus’s fond retrospective accounts of the rich intellectual and artistic life he and his fellow clerks lived in early 20th-century Manchester, and then ...”

“... of literary and colloquial registers horrified many critics. Providentially, in 1915 he met E.M. Forster, who, having volunteered for the Red Cross, was stationed in Alexandria during the First World War. He arranged the first translations of Cavafy’s work into English and made it known to such figures as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Here is ...”