Alan Hollinghurst

Ronald Firbank​ died on 21 May 1926, of pneumonia, in the Hotel Quirinale in Rome. He had lived alone for much of his adult life, and it seems likely that he died alone too – he had sent away the nurse who had been engaged to look after him. This detail comes from the only published account of the circumstances, by Lord Berners, who considered himself Firbank’s ‘only friend...

Homosexuality:​ do we really have to talk about it? Earl Winterton, aged 71, introducing a debate in the House of Lords in 1954, apologised for bringing forward ‘this nauseating subject’. In his youth it was never mentioned in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter...

Forster was an only child whose father died when he was one, and he was raised by his mother in an atmosphere thick with aunts. It’s a milieu he turns to his advantage in his fiction, where the middle-class female world is observed with a tone that Cyril Connolly described as ‘demure malice’. Such a resource wasn’t available for his day to day dealings with Lily Forster, a figure whose presence permeates these volumes long after she is dead. When he rapidly made a name for himself as a writer Lily seemed underwhelmed. ‘Mother bored by my literary successes,’ he notes after Howards End was published in 1910.