E. M. Forster is one of my favourite novelists and I was happy to find that he had published this collection of essays, broadcasts and articles in 1951 (I have a project of reading books published in 1951). The essays range from 1936 to 1951 and of course many of them are overshadowed by the build up to the second world war and so there is a brooding presence in even the most optimistic essays that are a sign of the times. In my experience many novels published during this period will completely ignore the political situation, but weekly articles do not have this luxury. Perhaps this is why the title of the book is two cheers for democracy rather than the usual three cheers. Actually in the essay "What I Believe" Forster says:

'So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.'

There are over 70 articles ranging from a couple of pages to eight or nine. There are two slightly longer essays "What I believe" and "Virginia Woolf" that are worth the price of the paperback alone: (my penguin reprint cost 50p second hand and was originally sold for 40p new, but my second hand copy comes complete with a note for Alasdair from Neil dated 25/04/74 and a few underlinings in the political essays.) The book is divided into two parts: The Second Darkness and What I believe. The Second Darkness contains the political essays and the authors thoughts on the rise of the Nazis and has titles such as "The Menace to Freedom", "Jew-Consciousness", "Racial Exercise", "Post Munich" and "Tolerance" This last one is a plea as to how the people should act after the war has ended. The second part is subdivided and starts with the essay "What I Believe" originally published in 1939 where Forster gives his views on democracy, force and violence, hero-worship (he distrusts so-called great men); the essay goes on to castigate power leading to corruption with the idea that: "The more highly public life is organised, the lower does its morality sink" and he is thinking about the houses of parliament, where there is no trust of each other. He concludes by saying;

"The above are the reflections of an individualist and a liberal, who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him and at first felt ashamed............Naked I came into this world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

There follows a section called Art in General where he addresses the subject Art for Arts Sake, which was an address delivered before the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in 1942. There follows the question 'Does Culture Matter?' There are a couple of essays on his love for classical music and The Raison D'être of criticism in the arts. The longest section is Art in Action which contains his excellent essay on the work of Virginia Woolf, but there are essays also on John Skelton, Gibbon, Voltaire, Andre Gide and even D'Annunzio among others. Mostly Eurocentric although he reaches out to India with Mohammed Iqbal and Syed Ross Masood. His love and enthusiasm for literature comes through, sometimes with hints of comparing himself to people that he admires. The final section is called 'Places' and these are places personal to the author. India of course features, but also The United States. In these short essays more of the personality of the author comes through, non more so than Clouds Hill which was where he used to go and stay with his good friend T E Lawrence and friends from the army base.

This is a series of essays that reveals much about the author, he calls himself a Prig when revisiting Cambridge and this comes through, but what also comes through is a liberal minded thinker who cared about his writing and whose company was one that I was loath to leave when I finished the book. He says in one of his essays tackling religion "It is impossible to be fair minded when one has faith - religious creeds have shown this. Faith makes one unkind" and I do not think you could accuse Forster of being unkind in these essays, written at a time, where might seemed as though it would be right, for always during the years of the second world war. A four star read. ( )

i can think of few authors i would rather listen to babble on about religion and culture and literature and being nice to each other, dammit. sure, there are some essays on specific authors that i wasn't as interested in, but just to read his description of how much virginia woolf loved the act of writing balanced all that out.

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A spectacular collection of essays by a great mind. Touches on politics and war (many written just before and just after WWII), and numerous other topics important to western society. ( )

Essays, broadcasts, and book reviews written from the mid-1930s through about 1950 by the novelist E.M. Forster. This is an excellent collection of writings on a variety of topics (freedom, literature, opera, colonialism) that remain relevant six decades after the book was published. I've been taken with this collection ever since I first read it -- for A-level English literature -- back in the 1970s. ( )