In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Yet there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was largely free of the vices commonly found in novelists of his generation - what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do. He didn’t lean rightward with the years or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the pope or the queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harboured no special hatred for the generation above or below him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum or foreigners swamping the city.