The Dowager Maharani—Tara Raja was her name—had long been known to me as Dewas-Nuisance-Lady No. 1. Widow to the previous ruler, she had supported her nephew’s elevation to the throne, but once he was there did nothing but vex him . . . A row about a silver spoon, which she accused her English companion of stealing, shook the court from top to bottom, and there was still greater trouble over the state jewels which she annexed, and was obliged to give up on his marriage. She squabbled with his mother, she danced dressed as a man with her maidservants similarly dressed, she was unruly and bizarre, and she tried to poison him . . . As we poured out tea, or she the tea and I the milk, as we offered one another bread and butter, or blew the flies off the little cakes, I can never have come nearer to banqueting with Catherine de’ Medici.

(The Hill of Devi)

At the Palais de la Mutualité, about 1935, before Gide and all the congregation of anti-fascist writers—I remember the tall, gay, beak-faced Pasternak, and Malraux, ever lit by the brilliance of an internal dialogue—Forster said, ‘Censorship is stupid. A writer speaks of the sexual act openly, and the book is declared obscene and it’s confiscated. Why not, I ask, treat the sexual act as a comic business. Why not, and then give it a good laugh.’

E.M. Forster is eighty-five years old. It is difficult to believe this. The first time I saw him, in a restaurant in Soho, just before the Second World War, my companion said to me, ‘There, look, that’s E.M. Forster.’ I had imagined a man important-looking and incommunicable, somewhat like a professor. But I saw a face that was young, luminous, nobly discreet, someone who tried to know a thing rather than see it, yet who saw in a way no one else ever did.

‘The cow is there,’ said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, ‘She is there, the cow. There, now.’

‘You have not proved it,’ said a voice.

‘I have proved it to myself.’

‘I have proved to myself that she isn’t,’ said the voice. ‘The cow is not there.’ Ansell frowned and lit another match.

‘She’s there for me,’ he declared. ‘I don’t care whether she’s there for you or not. Whether I’m in Cambridge or Iceland or dead, the cow will be there.’

It was philosophy. They were discussing the existence of objects.

(The Longest Journey)