Only Connect: The Official Quiz Book: Jack Waley-Cohen

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When Rickie Elliot, in The Longest Journey, stumbles upon Gerald and Agnes, an engaged couple, in an embrace, Forster describes the effect on him in terms borrowed from the overture to Das Rheingold: It was a fragment of the Tune of tunes.

This is the fight for gay liberation, and the unrecorded history Moffat alludes to in her title is the history of Forster’s homosexuality. Having never missed an episode of Only Connect I was thrilled when the book came out, it's just as good as the programme and just as perplexing, would make a great after dinner game at Christmas, good value for money.

This tendency becomes more problematic when Moffat interprets away the genuine ambiguity, and occasional darkness, that Forster himself acknowledged in some of his sexual feelings and relationships. In her preface she quotes Christopher Isherwood, shortly after Forster’s death in 1970, saying that “all those books [about Forster] have got to be re-written.

Yet this determination to vindicate in art the injustices of life paralyzed the very qualities that we think of as most Forsterian: the relaxed irony of his plotting, the urbanity of his moralizing, the lyricism of his prose. Consider that Forster belonged to the same generation as Proust, whom he admired very much, and Mann, whom he seems not to have read at all. He recorded that as a boy he “learnt that there was queer stuff in Bible [ sic], and thought that ‘lying together’ meant that a man placed his stomach against a woman’s and that it was a crisis when he warmed her—perhaps that a child was born, but of this I cannot be sure. Dutiful sons, loving husbands, responsible fathers—these are what she wants, and if we are friends it must be in our spare time.

And this is perhaps the source of the problem with “What I Believe”: in 1939, Forster is writing as though English liberalism were already defeated, as though he were addressing an occupied country. Kermode, for one, takes a much drier view of “What I Believe,” which he dissects in one of the best passages of his book. There does not seem to be any evidence on such questions, and the reader is left feeling that Moffat so much wants Forster to have enjoyed himself that she simply asserts that he did. Forster treats Bast’s longing for art and culture as delusional, hopeless; he is “one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit.