Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

E.M. Forster's A Room With a View was my first intimation of the possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how much it could do to you. I felt it was very good and that the reading of it had done me some good. I loved it. I was too young, at 11, to realise serious people don't speak of novels this way.

-- Zadie Smith, a young contemporary writer I am fond of, writes in this weekend's Guardian Review about E.M. Forster, an old dead writer I am exceedingly fond of, pulling in Keats (a young dead writer I am head over heels in love with) along the way.