A long journey

I never liked E. M. Forster much. He was too preachy and prissy, too snobbish about the suburbs, too contemptuous of the lower classes. I know this is not how a review is meant to begin. You may legitimately kick off by admitting that you have a soft spot for your subject, even perhaps that you used to be friends. But reveal a longstanding dislike in your first paragraph, and the reader may reasonably wonder why the editor did not give the book to someone else.

My only excuse for this confession is that I am not alone. For a novelist, essayist and critic of such acknowledged eminence, Forster has had a surprising number of enemies. There was something about him that got people’s goat, and still does. Some people disliked him, some people disliked his books, some people disliked both. After listening to Forster’s Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1927, F.