P. N. Furbank has written three literary biographies: lives of Italo Svevo, E. M. Forster, and Denis Diderot. The first has made a neglected Italian writer more widely known; the last has clarified the myriad complexities of a famous French writer of the Enlightenment. But it is his life of the quintessentially English Forster that is Furbank's chief claim to fame and one of the major literary biographies of the twentieth century.

Philip Nicholas "Nick" Furbank was born in Cranleigh, Surrey, on 23 May 1920, the second son of William Percival Furbank, a local bank manager, and his wife Grace Furbank, of Brockham Green, Surrey. He attended Reigate Grammar School in his home county before entering Cambridge University to read English, achieving a First in both parts of the Tripos. His elder brother, who wrote short stories, was killed in a flying accident in 1941. At the time of this tragedy...