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. In writing it, Forster had a clear moral and political idea in mind: “To give these people a chance—to see . whether their convictions of Sin are really more than the burrs in the social fabric that the heart and brain, working together, can pluck out—that’s why I wrote Maurice. engenders a trance, a feeling of automatic writing, a fleeting fantasy of complete connection with Morgan’s remarkable mind and heart.

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.Indeed, precisely because Forster does begin to address sex openly, as Austen never does, he can seem the more dated of the two. 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.

But Forster might have fairly responded that most office boys were not Muir or Pritchett, that thousands of men as intellectually thwarted as Bast did exist, and that in any case this story of failure was the story he wanted to tell.

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. 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. Think of what the spirit of English prose meant for Dickens and Hardy and Lawrence—men who did not inherit a fortune as Forster did, but made their fortunes, and their names and souls, by their writing. Having never missed an episode of Only Connect I was thrilled when the book came out, it's just as good as the programme and just as perplexing, would make a great after dinner game at Christmas, good value for money. One way of coming to grips with this question is to address the place of Mauricein Forster’s oeuvre.