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

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Outwardly [Henry Wilcox] was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad.... And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him. It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. The Only Connect Quiz Book collects over 200 of the most entertaining and perplexing challenges from the team behind the BBC’s hugely popular quiz show - including many new (never broadcast) questions. Covering each of the show’s four rounds – Connections, Sequences, the Connecting Wall and Missing Vowels – and with introductions from presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, here is your chance to put your own sleuthing and quizzical knowledge to the Only Connect test. Read more Details But what if the kind of sexual freedom that Forster championed, in these early novels, is not really what he cared about at all? That is the thesis of Moffat’s book, which can be read as an attempt to renew Forster’s pertinence by recasting him as a fighter in a different liberation struggle, one that has not yet won complete success. This is the fight for gay liberation, and the unrecorded history Moffat alludes to in her title is the history of Forster’s homosexuality. 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. Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing’s any good at all.” A similar thing happens when Forster confesses that living in Egypt, as a representative of the ruling race, bred racist habits of mind. “I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudice,” he wrote, “but in 10 months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pump shitting or eating or laughing or anythinging—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian towards the native.... It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.” It could not be clearer that Forster, with typical honesty, is using himself as a case study for the very evil he was to analyze in A Passage to India—the way that racial privilege corrupts, even if the man who enjoys it means well. So limber up your frontal lobes, and get ready to pit your wits against the toughest quiz on TV. Read more Look Inside Details

W hy, in the 1930s ,did Forster make such a limited, dispirited defense of the novel and of liberalism? Was it, at least in part, because he had long resigned himself to making similarly limited claims on behalf of homosexuals, and for himself as a homosexual? He could circulate Mauricein private, but not publish it; he could trust friends with the knowledge of his gayness, but he could not make it an element of his public literary identity. Even in Mauriceitself, the happy ending consists of the lovers running away to “the greenwood,” a Shakespearean zone of imaginary freedom. The idea that they could demand public recognition—say, by setting up house together in London—was beyond literary possibility (though Forster knew a number of established gay couples). Indeed, Forster’s “aristocracy,” whose “members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet,” could with only the slightest alteration be a description of the way gay society functioned in his time—just as, in The Longest Journey, his “friendship office” for the “marriage of true minds” reads as a veiled description of gay partnership.

Moffat’s possessiveness is colored by a strong moral earnestness, which leads her to want to make reparation to the novelist for all the repression and unhappiness that he suffered in his lifetime. This laudable impulse comes across, for instance, in the way Moffat adds an approving adjective to every sexual experience of Forster’s she has occasion to mention. So, when Forster visits New York and goes cruising in Central Park, Moffat writes that it was “a glorious night of casual sex,” and at another moment notes that Forster liked to “discover or arrange sexy flings on trips abroad.” Was the sex really glorious that night? Were the flings always satisfyingly sexy? 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. Yet Moffat, even as she cites this passage, hastens to palliate it: “On the other hand, it seemed grotesque to Morgan to deny consciousness or agency to Kanaya ... just because [he wasn’t] white. In the murky world of English-colonial relations wasn’t skepticism that a brown man could feel affection for him simply a different sort of bigotry?” Finally, Moffat writes, “Morgan concluded that he was ill-equipped to interpret the sexual lexicon of this strange world.” But there is no quotation to illustrate these anachronistic-sounding doubts about “consciousness or agency,” and one is left feeling that Moffat’s relativism is just a way of making Forster sound more admirable than he was or knew himself to be. I resumed sexual intercourse with him, but it was now mixed with the desire to inflict pain. It didn’t hurt him to speak of, but it was bad for me, and new in me ... I’ve never had that desire with anyone else, before or after, and I wasn’t trying to punish him—I knew his silly little soul was incurable. I just felt he was a slave, without rights, and I a despot whom no one could call to account. Only Connect is the ultimate test of knowledge and lateral thinking. Since 2008 the fiendishly difficult quiz show has been challenging contestants to find connections between apparently unrelated clues. WheneverE.M. Forster is discussed, the phrase “only connect” is sure to come up sooner or later. The epigraph to Howards End, the book he described with typical modesty as “my best novel and approaching a good novel,” seems to capture the leading idea of all his work—the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the barriers of race, class, and nation. What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private—the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires.

Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the shafts enough has beensaid already), what is very peculiarto this church—its luminousness.”Was there anything to be learnt from this fine sentence? Could he adapt itto the needs of daily life? Could heintroduce it, with modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother,the lay reader? For example—“Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat—its obscurity.”Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that something, had he known it, was the spirit of English Prose. “My flat is dark as well as stuffy.” Those were the words for him.

At the time Forster wrote Maurice, these were things that he urgently needed to say and that the world needed to hear. Of course, the world did not hear them—Forster said that the novel was “unpublishable until my death and England’s,” and until very close to his death he was right. Gide could write openly about his homosexuality in Corydon, in 1924, and Mann could publish Death in Venicein 1912, the year before Forster started Maurice; but France and even Germany were not England. Moffat reminds the reader that, as late as 1952, the great mathematician Alan Turing was sentenced to chemical castration after being found guilty of the crime of homosexuality, and committed suicide as a result. Forster lamented this extreme intolerance in Mauriceitself: when Maurice finds that even a course of hypnotism cannot “cure” him, his doctor advises him “to live in some country that has adopted the Code Napoleon ... France or Italy, for instance. There homosexuality is no longer criminal.” With a healthy dose of trivia between games (What are the greatest ever Only Connect questions? Who is the best team of all time?) and an introduction by presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, The Only Connect Quiz Book will take you skills to a new level.

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