Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

by Susan Hill

A profound truth though seldom recognised. It is often said that mankind needs a faith if the world is to be improved. In fact, unless the faith is vigilantly and regularly checked by a sense of man’s fallibility, it is likely to make the world worse. From Torquemada to Robespierre and Hitler the men who have made mankind suffer the most have been inspired to do so by a strong faith; so strong that it led them to think their crimes were acts of virtue necessary to help them achieve their aim, which was to build some sort of an ideal kingdom on earth. But as we have been told on very good authority, the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world. Those who think they can establish it here are more likely to create a hell on earth.

‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are right to do it and I quite understand your obsession but I hope you won’t be offended if I never read it. I’ve done with all that and I can’t go back to it.’ I did not understand what he meant but I came to do so later, when I had finished the novel. I wrote the First World War out of myself and I, too, have never been able to go back to it.