What's so great about EM Forster

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2020

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Deborah Levy and Laurence Scott talk to Shahidha Bari about the writer's work from his earliest novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) to his Essay Aspects of the Novel (1927). Recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature at the British Library.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Laurence Scott is the author of The Four-Dimensional Human and Picnic, Comma, Lightning. He presented a Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Merchant Ivory which includes interviews about their film adpatations of EM Forster's work https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04003kn Deborah Levy is the author of novels including Hot Milk, Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything

Find more programmes about literature in this Free Thinking Prose and Poetry playlist on our website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh You'll find Deborah Levy on Writing and Frankness, Wilfred Owen Poetry and Peace, winners of the RSL Ondaatje Prize debating place all recorded with the Royal Society of Literature at the British Library. Our Landmarks collection includes programmes about George Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell and many other writers https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I just say?
0:01.5	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:04.0	It's such a wonderful listen.
0:05.6	So nice.
0:06.5	There are loads more like it on BBC sounds.
0:08.8	Different paces, different heights.
0:10.6	The roof is buckling.
0:11.9	Where you can also listen to live sports commentary.
0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:35.8	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, podcasts.
0:39.4	Hello. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice. So observed the novelist,
0:45.8	essayist and literary critic E.M. Forster in 1908. His most famous works, Howard's End,
0:52.6	a room with a view and a Passage to India,
0:54.9	chronicle the morals and manners of the English upper middle classes in the early decades of the 20th century.
1:01.0	They record the internal conflicts and private passions that threaten to derail ordinary life.
1:06.6	But they also reflect on empire, sexuality and freedom in an age of tumultuous social change.
	...

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