Sleeping with the Enemy: Stories_ (1992), which gave him his first international audience and which had as its title-and subject-matter a theme he explored for the next three decades: his own childhood experiences in Berlin. _The Kindly Ones_ (1995) was about a boy who comes under the spell of the SS's _Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler_ (bodyguard regiment) in 1944. His best-selling _The Remains of the Day_ (1989), which explores English country house snobbery and the compromises that people have to make to fit in to any social order, was about his experience of life in a remote post at the British Embassy in Peking during the final years of the British Empire. _Moloka'i_ (1995) is the story of the final days in the life of two old men on the Hawaiian island of that name. _Small World_ (2001) takes place on a single day in Berlin, during the Nazi era, while _The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency_ (1999) is the story of a successful black African expatriate detective living in the former Rhodesia who solves murders there and in Botswana. His 2002 novel, _The Finkler Question_ , was about a Jewish family who, just prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, fled to England from Berlin and who now have to face the possibility of being forced to choose whether to return or stay in London. Forster has said that he learned much about telling a story from his friend and former university professor, Graham Greene, and his novels explore topics and issues – racism, corruption, sexism and violence – that would have remained taboo in novels in earlier times. Greene was important to Forster in a more practical sense as well: Forster was able to use his friend's literary agent, Anthony Shorter. Greene, who was gay, was in the habit of having both sex and food brought to him wherever he was staying so that he could feed his guests and take them to bed. Shorter recommended that Forster turn to him and this paved the way for Forster's publishing success. In fact, Forster's second, much longer work of fiction – a three-part novel called _A Passage to India_ (the title refers to a train journey in which a number of people experience extraordinary events that change them and their relationships) – was only published in the UK in 1991 after more than a decade of resistance from the British publishers. Its reception was so bad – it was savaged in reviews in the popular press – that Forster eventually rewrote the whole thing from scratch and published the work himself in 2003 as a novel. Forster has also written several works of non-fiction, including _What I Believe_ (2001) and the controversial but widely admired _What I Believe: Volume 2_ (2003). As a literary figure who broke new ground, who challenged received opinion, who reimagined many aspects of life in the modern world, who was obsessed with 'the past' as a site of truth, who was fascinated by 'the Other' and by the complexity of 'difference', whose work is so rich in ideas, and whose politics were so radical, Forster is in some sense the pre-eminent twentieth-century British novelist. What is equally remarkable is the fact that the publication of his first two novels did not result in the kind of international success that, say, J.K. Rowling had after the publication of _Harry Potter_. If anything, _A Passage to India_ actually drew him further from international attention – it was published in paperback but the American edition came out in 1999 in a translation by Edward Baxter. In fact, this book may have been too long (it has seven sections of varying length) and too complicated to sell abroad. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, Forster was for many years an almost unknown author. The British Library has several volumes of his collected essays and memoirs and a new critical edition of his works published in 2009. Still, the fact that Forster was able to write this novel and that it was so successful in its time was of monumental importance in terms of British culture. Even at the time, there was a sense that Forster's work heralded a new and more nuanced way of thinking about Britain and its history. The novel's publication was a big enough event in the early 1990s to generate controversy in the British newspapers and on British radio and television. _The Times_ newspaper – perhaps the country's most conservative – criticized the novel on moral grounds and questioned whether it was suitable for general reading. Even _The Guardian_ newspaper felt compelled to comment on the book's 'not-too-enticing' title, although Forster had the last laugh: in November 1992, _The Guardian_ 's books editor, Peter Preston, named _A Passage to India_ one of the one hundred greatest novels in the English language. The same year, in the UK, the book came in at number eleven on the _Independent_ newspaper's list of the ten best novels of all time. Forster's third and final novel, _Howard's End_ (1921), also caused a stir when it was published, a decade after the publication of _A Passage to India_ and four years after Forster's death, in June 1964. The publication of Forster's third novel helped to transform him from a writer with a small following to one whose work would be important for decades to come. The fact that this novel was also the longest and most complex of all his novels – its four volumes cover almost half a century – made the fact that it made such an impression on the literary and cultural establishment all the more remarkable. Moreover, its publication marked the beginning of a new phase in Forster's career: he was read and appreciated not only in the UK but also in the US (where it was quickly reprinted in paperback) and even in France, where it was published as a complete novel (the first translation into French) in 1982. In addition to novels and essays, Forster's legacy is also rich in the form of film and television adaptations. The BBC published a short story based on _A Passage to India_ in 1996 and Hollywood went on to adapt the novel as an acclaimed film directed by Anthony Minghella in 1984. Forster's works have been translated into dozens of other languages. In fact, _Howard's End_ was recently turned into a hugely successful movie starring Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Ehle, which was an adaptation of a 2003 BBC television miniseries that starred Felicity Kendal, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters and Colin Firth. If Forster and Eliot – the most canonical English poets from the twentieth century – seem antithetical in terms of style and content, that is, to a large extent, because of their different contexts. Eliot was a poet of the modern world. He moved from tradition to modernity, from an English to a 'world' language (if we consider poetry to be a language in its own right). In the face of modernity, Eliot is both conservative and radical – an attempt to reimagine 'English' and keep it alive. Forster is a writer of the past. He wrote about the 'ancients', he read old texts, he wrote in the style of the 'Ancient Mariner', his novels were based on myths, he worked in what was, by contemporary standards, a relatively small-scale vocabulary. Forster's world is English but it is not like Eliot's; it is a different kind of English. Eliot and Forster wrote a great deal about homosexuality. It's no accident that both men, even if their attitudes were so different, addressed a question about the future of same-sex love – one about the possibilities, the promise, the limitations and the fear that such love could offer. Forster's novel about the last days in the life of two ageing men in England, called _Maurice_ , was written just as British law was gradually relaxing its views about homosexuality. In the decade leading up to Forster's death in 1964, however, there were very few openly gay men in Britain. That gay writers could address homosexual love and not risk being subjected to censorship laws is a product of a relatively open and tolerant society in which same-sex relationships were beginning to be accepted as a legitimate topic of literary, cultural and social interest. In this sense, Forster can be seen as a kind of forerunner to what was to happen with gay love in Britain after the 1980s. His was a life not so very different from that of millions of ordinary people in the decades before that. Gay culture emerged and flourished in the years after the 1960s, when he died. Homosexuals, like all people, are different, and their desire is similar to other forms of desire. That is, we have no reason to believe that homosexuals were not 'normal' before 1945 and therefore it is pointless to assume that because they were 'different' in the 1950s and 1960s, they should have felt that they were 'bad'. We can make many mistakes about human nature – especially in the ways in which we discriminate against others. In some cases, we may well make mistakes because we have stereotyped people in the way that Forster suggests. However, we cannot assume – even when we stereotype – that all 'peoples' or 'groups' of people are bad or wrong. _A Passage to India_ is also a love story – both about marriage and about love. It is a