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He blinks and night is day

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Light Perpetual’, 17 June 2021

Light Perpetual 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, February, 978 0 571 33648 7
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... 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 ...

In the Company of Confreres

Terry Eagleton: ‘Modern British Fiction’, 12 December 2002

On Modern British Fiction 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 328 pp., £14.99, October 2002, 0 19 924932 6
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... 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 ...

Bastards

James Wood: St Aubyn’s Savage Sentences, 2 November 2006

Mother’s Milk 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 279 pp., £12.99, January 2006, 0 330 43589 2
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... 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 ...

How do they see you?

Elizabeth Spelman: Martha Nussbaum, 16 November 2000

Sex and Social Justice 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Oxford, 476 pp., £25, July 1999, 0 19 511032 3
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Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £17.95, May 2000, 0 521 66086 6
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... 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 ...

Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
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... 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 ...

Cramming for Success

James Wood: Hardy in London, 15 June 2017

Thomas Hardy: Half A Londoner 
by Mark Ford.
Harvard, 305 pp., £20, October 2016, 978 0 674 73789 1
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... 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 ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: My Father, Hugh Thomas, 15 June 2017

... 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 ...

Diary

John Bayley: Serious Novels, 10 November 1994

... 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 ...

Pal o’ Me Heart

David Halperin: Jamie O’Neill, 22 May 2003

At Swim, Two Boys 
by Jamie O'Neill.
Scribner, 572 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 0 7432 0714 9
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... 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 ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... 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 ...

Porno Swagger

Edmund Gordon: ‘Cleanness’, 16 April 2020

Cleanness 
by Garth Greenwell.
Picador, 223 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 374 12458 8
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... 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 ...

Mid-Century Male

Christopher Glazek: Edmund White, 19 July 2012

Jack Holmes and His Friend 
by Edmund White.
Bloomsbury, 390 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 1 4088 0579 4
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... 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 ...

It’s Finished

John Lanchester: The Banks, 28 May 2009

... 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 ...

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