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“... None, really, nor does the focus on sex lead him – as he writes in U&I of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst – towards ‘subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behaviour’. ‘People masturbate a lot in paradise’ is the main revelation on offer, though perhaps the wisest words in the book are addressed to the ...”

“... point it breaks down. In his most recent novels, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst introduced long gaps into the narrative in a way that requires the reader’s relationship with the story to be renegotiated almost from scratch (the new time period tends to bring with it new points of view, further testing the ...”

“... of the subject. Seamus Heaney is one of its leading perpetrators. Another instance, this time Alan Hollinghurst on Graham Swift’s Waterland, is quoted by Lindsay Duguid: ‘The prose itself falls into a recurrent pattern of question and answer which imitates syntactically the historical inquiry it furthers.’ From Sydney to San Diego, the speakers ...”

“... the influence of Martin Amis’s Money. Neither St Aubyn nor his obvious colleague-in-style Alan Hollinghurst is interested in Amis’s jaggy riffs, but here and there the sardonic placement of a perfect, electric adjective or noun, or the ironically self-conscious stoicism of a delicately weighted verb, suggest something of Amis, as in the verb ...”

“... any partner to them. Quotations from Lawrence, Joyce, the pseudonymous Laurence St Clair, Alan Hollinghurst and others, and Nussbaum’s extended commentary on them, provide ample opportunity (not taken advantage of) to have index entries for ‘cocks, soaping of in showers’, ‘erection, elephantine’, ‘genital organs, the calling by proper ...”

“... in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly right. But Pevsner was if not an unconscious then an incidental stylist. The greatest understatement in The Buildings of England is unrhetorical and comes at the end of his account of his working ...”

“... Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert Cottrell(Financial Times)Martyn Goff(Daily Telegraph)John Osborne(New Standard)John Sutherland(London Review of Books)Auberon Waugh(Daily Mail)In all ...”

“... still informs much contemporary work. Think of fiction by Anne Enright, Eimear McBride, Alan Hollinghurst; but also, in an important postcolonial modification, Naipaul, Amit Chaudhuri, Zia Haider Rahman. We were Hardy’s heirs, without quite knowing it; Mark Ford has located the ...”

“... communal gardens that are a feature of the Ladbroke Estate, and which appear in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. People tell me that one of the characters in The Line of Beauty is based on Hugh. I don’t see it. Many people tell me many things about Hugh, not always kindly. I haven’t always asked them why they wanted to tell me. This central ...”

“... seemed to inspire some of the best novels, notably James Kelman’s How late it was, how late, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, Anita Brookner’s A Private View, Candia McWilliam’s Debatable Land. A heterogeneous assortment, but in each case the subject and its world had found the author, not the other way round. Kelman’s tremulously ...”

“... may be, At Swim, Two Boys is arguably the most important work of gay male historical fiction since Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Much of the best gay male writing in English during the past fifteen years, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been preoccupied with historical themes. O’Neill’s novel deserves to be read alongside ...”

“... Then he fell back upon the rhetorical generalities for which he was well known.’ In the words of Alan Clark: ‘For a few seconds Kinnock had her cornered, and you could see fear in those blue eyes. But then he had an attack of wind, gave her time to recover.’ Moore also quotes Tony Blair, who was sitting in the chamber as a young MP, taking note: ‘It ...”

“... In​ U&I (1991), his book about John Updike, Nicholson Baker imagines explaining the appeal of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to his literary hero. ‘You know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realise that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!’ But Updike couldn’t get used to the sex ...”

“... it as one of the few contemporary novels he liked. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Friedman, the author of a forgotten novel called Hermaphrodeity, who described it as ‘a nearly inscrutable mystery’ powered by ‘camp, vamp and very damp wit’. He praised White’s ‘poetic brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but ...”

“... that by acting on that belief, it will make it come true. About twenty years ago I bumped into Alan Hollinghurst at a party at the Poetry Society. He greeted me with the words, ‘Hello. I’m going to tremendous, Basil Fawltyish lengths to avoid being introduced to Sir Stephen Spender,’ whose collected poems he had just given an unglowing ...”