For E.M. Forster the diary was of spasmodic usefulness, and for long stretches of his long and oddly shaped life might well not be a writer’s diary at all. As he acknowledged, ‘unfortunately I only open this book when my heart aches’; and even then there can be passages as stoically minimal as the diary of A.E. Housman (‘I spoke,’ and ‘Non respondit’ are disproportionately momentous remarks). In all the most intimate matters the entries are mere cryptic memoranda, and on a few occasions happiness writes white: ‘After which Bob and I .’ The type for these provoking blanks may be a boyhood diary he recalled keeping; a strange incident had occurred when he was sent for a walk on the Downs near Eastbourne by his prep-school headmaster, and had been induced to masturbate a middle-aged man behind some gorse bushes (‘Dear little fellow … play with it … pull it about’): ‘I made an entry in my diary <<