Nicola Beauman

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“It’s possible, these days, to think of E. M. Forster's cultural role as the providing of stories for {{w|Merchant Ivory Productions|Merchant and Ivory}} to make into pretty movies. For people who think that way, Nicola Beauman's new biography will be a useful corrective. Here, in a book of modest length (at last, a biography that is not longer than its subject's collected works!), is what every general reader should know about Forster's life and contacts.”

“{{w|Elizabeth Taylor (novelist)|Elizabeth}}'s letters to Ray give a very good idea of her literary influences. These were definitely not her mother's her favorites (Hardy, {{w|Adam Bede}}, Gissing) and Elizabeth has grown out of Dostoevsky, dislikes Dickens, finds Lawrence a 'bloody crosspatch' and thinks Katherine Mansfield moaned too much. 'It is easy to see who is behind me: Jane Austen & Chekhov & EM Forster & Virginia Woolf. ...'... Other important writers for her were Sterne (for his relationship to the reader), Richardson and Fielding.Above all she revered Jane Austen and Turgenev.”

“{{w|Lady Cynthia Asquith|Cynthia}} was always to attribute depression to ill-health or, when she was much older, to the prevailing east wind. She never assumed it was a facet of her temperament or that her life could reasonably cause it.”