Perhaps the most unusual of the British writers who achieved classic status in the twentieth century was E. M. Forster. He published no fiction between 1924, when A Passage to India came out, and his death in 1970. Yet his reputation continued to grow, and it did not suffer when one of the principal reasons for his long silence became public after his death, with the publication of what he had in fact written in the interim, namely a novel, Maurice, and several stories with homosexual themes.

This was followed by virtual canonization, with the release of several films that were the high water mark of British nostalgia about its imperial past. The film of A Passage, with a splendid portrayal by Peggy Ashcroft of its strange old heroine Mrs Moore (and a preposterous caricature by Alec Guinness of Prof Godbole, Forster's own bizarre interpretation of spiritual India), joined the television serial based on Scott's Raj Quartet (called with no sense of Scott's sense of irony, The Jewel in the Crown) and Gandhi as essays in romantic nostalgia.

True, they all portrayed ugly aspects of the empire, the bloodshed of partition, the patronizing insensitivity of several representatives of the Raj, but all this was secondary to a sense that really, the vast majority of the British were pretty good chaps, even if it was only the women (Peggy Ashcroft again superb as the sympathetic missionary Barbie Batchelor in The Jewel) who could express what they truly felt. What they suffered from their countrymen when they did this was sanitized out of the picture.