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“... if he hadn’t died at the age of 27, Brooke was, the letter leaves little doubt, a big show-off. Alan Hollinghurst has always had a soft spot for show-offs. In his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), the narrator reads a review of a Shostakovich concert that he skipped to spend time with a newish boyfriend, who ‘would have been sitting on my ...”

“... hype: they are particularly interested in his half-brother, Terry Burns, who was sent to Cane Hill, a Surrey asylum for the insane, and committed suicide. (Charles Chaplin’s mother also ended up in Cane Hill.) Thirdly, the Gillmans want to interpret Bowie’s lyrics. These three interests make for a long, probing ...”

“... commentary. Some of the material excised from earlier versions reappeared in On the Black Hill, Chatwin’s first novel, in particular an account of two walks which drew heavily on Proust, a model that Clapp thought inappropriate. She didn’t want him quoting from the master, either: that would have been pretentious. Chatwin’s other models look ...”

“... at Camp Unity in the summer of 1936 led to his poem about the execution of the activist Joe Hill becoming an anthem of the labour movement (‘I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night/Alive as you or me/Says I, But Joe, you’re ten years dead/I never died, says he’). After the Moscow Trials began, Hayes felt that the ...”

“... or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that reference water: vast bodies of it, along with drains, pipes and other signs of liquid urban ...”

“... Malham but as a regicide died in captivity and is buried at Plymouth. Tea in Pateley, then up the hill above the high street to look at Pateley old church, roofless now but restored by English Heritage. It’s a bare interior with a primitive Gothic east window, a tower and plenty of odd doors and openings, which is somehow Scottish and feels like a set for ...”

“... 1950s sensibility. The new generation of poets, dominated by the Big H brands (Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney), were prosodically and thematically more ambitious. And the cultural mood of the later decades of the 20th century was not indulgent to the perceived misogyny and Little Englandism of Larkin and Amis when ...”

“... sight of it. It doesn’t quite match R.’s experience when a heron mobbed by crows near Primrose Hill missed him by inches, but as with any evidence of urban rurality, I find it cheering. It confirms, too, my detestation of gulls, which I would happily see hounded out of cities and back to their proper stamping ground. 28 July. I’m just finishing the ...”

“... Factory, his life in a flat on a South London estate (the nearest Tube, rather oddly, is Tower Hill), his work in a record shop, and his hatred for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. With an unerring gift for making the worst of things he takes Madeline to Phantom of the Opera, queuing for five and a half hours only to see the last tickets go to those just ...”

“... racing. ‘I think a cup of coffee is in order,’ I said to Martin Johnson of the Independent and Alan Lee of the Times, ‘and the only place on the ground that serves a proper filtered cup of the stuff is the Hove Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at a profit ...”

“... there, soaking up the pressure. And much the same goes for his two relatively youthful cohorts, Alan Hansen and Trevor Brooking. They, too, and fairly recently, have served time in the communal bath. Hence all the player-to-player repartee that Gary likes to nurture: ‘Well, speaking as a striker, I would probably have missed that, too,’ he will ...”

“... and rather academic poet moved by imagery of kirk and court, rather like a Scottish Geoffrey Hill: Day updawis, shaddois flee Be thou as the Hairt tae me Upon the high hill Bethery Blintering floor o’ Sharon’s rose Like glaur and stoor warld’s glory goes Tae haud nor bield it nae man knows ... For all their ...”

“... Rupert before indicating me and saying: ‘And is this your young man?’11 October. In Primrose Hill Books I glance through Volume II of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, noting that it recycles Graham Turner’s mendacious interview with me and other so-called artists and intellectuals in which we are supposed to have dismissed Mrs T. out ...”

“... precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill, as they dragged James past – the child clearly in some distress. Watching those boys on camera brought into my head a flurry of pictures from my own boyhood. At that age, we were brimming with nastiness. I grew up on a scheme in the last of Scotland’s ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”