E. M. Forster to Malcolm Darling, 29 July 1911: 'I have been reading Kipling's child's history of England with mingled joy and disgust. It's a fine conception, but oh is it necessary to build character on a psychological untruth? In other words to teach the young citizen that he is absolutely unlike the young German or the young Bashahari -- that foreigners are envious and treacherous, Englishmen, through some freak of God, never --? Kipling and all that school know it's an untruth at the bottom of their hearts -- as untrue as it is unloveable. But, for the sake of patriotism, they lie. It is despairing [...] 'I couldn't on the other hand read the New Machiavelli, finding it too fretful and bumptious, and very inartistic, but must try again -- the more so as Wells, in an article in Le Temps has mentioned me among the authors qui meritent etre mieux connus en France [...] The best novels I have come across in the past year are Rosalind Murray's The Leading Note [...] and Wedgwood's Shadow of a Titan -- unfortunately written in an affected and unreadable style.'