“... myself understood, the more it becomes obvious that he will never escape condemnation, the thing John Major called for more of in his statement at the time of the trial. I have dreams about the boys, and sometimes dream I am the person in the CCTV footage who walks past them with a shopping bag at the exact moment they abducted James. I can see the ...”

“... years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as a cautionary episode in a treatise such as that of Priestley’s replacement Johann Reinhold Forster, whose account of Cook’s second voyage was a synthesis of late 18th-century natural history, scholarship and creative imagination, and included several pages on Priestley’s virtues as chemist and physician. Perhaps Priestley’s death would have been ...”

“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... that orthodoxy calls most persuasively to those who know, as Christ told the woman of Samaria in John 4.10, that there is no living water in this life. Eliot could state this perception without complaint, and even joke about it in his sober way. He tells his brother about ‘the kink in my brain which makes life at all an unremitting strain for me, and which ...”

“... conclusion would seem to be, Meredith has not worn well.’ In that essay Woolf quoted E.M. Forster, who, the year before, had despatched Meredith in Aspects of the Novel with a dig at ‘the home counties posing as the universe’ and the final verdict that Meredith ‘now lies in the trough’ – an especially telling demolition, as Leavis ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a daughter; Smith was ...”

“... children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed ...”

“... Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Such connections ensured that he wrote many letters; he asked that they be destroyed after his death, but ...”

“... The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot appeared at the end of 1935, not quite three years after its subject’s death, and must be one of the very last examples of what was by that time a gravely endangered species. In the preface to Eminent Victorians Strachey had wittily mocked the solemn pretensions of the Victorian and Edwardian monumental biography, ponderously discreet as an old-fashioned manservant: but 17 years later Marrot found it still possible to produce a work of unblushing hagiography ...”

“... literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight Macdonald were among the many writers active on the anti-Stalinist left who were in conflict with the League. Partisan Review posed a series of questions challenging ...”

“... of Strangers (1981), can be seen as an attempt to balance the irrational and the rational: what Forster called the ‘low atavistic form’ of storytelling with a larger explanatory context – social, historical or scientific. There’s a passage in McEwan’s spy novel Sweet Tooth (2012), a light but compelling box of tricks, in which an author who ...”

“... 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 ...”