TBV (on hiatus)’s Reviews > The Forsyte Saga Complete Novels > Status Update

And the day was silent well-nigh to breathlessness.

Sir Timothy was again staring at the Goya.
‘Family portrait?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Michael; ‘it’s a Goya.’
‘Deuce it is! Goy is Jewish for Christian. Female Christian – what?’
‘No, sir. Name of the Spanish painter.’
‘No idea there were any except Murillo and Velasquez...’

Suspicion had been dawning on Michael for years that its appearances were deceptive; that members of Parliament, theatre-goers, trotty little ladies with dresses tight blown about trotty little figures, plethoric generals in armchairs, pettish and petted poets, parsons in pulpits, posters in the street – above all, the Press, were not representative of the national disposition. [Prior to general strike, 1926]

Four novels and two novellas read; five novels and some 'interludes' (novellas) to go...

There was a thing they called psycho-analysis, which so far as he could understand attributed people’s action not to what they ate at breakfast, or the leg they got out of bed with, as in the good old days, but to some shock they had received in the remote past and entirely forgotten. The subconscious mind! Fads! Fads and microbes!

‘Pragmatist! But believe me, Forsyte – if the working class would concentrate on baths and accent instead of on their political and economic tosh, equality would be here in no time.’
‘I don’t want equality,’ said Soames, taking his ticket to Westminster.