Hollinghurst seems too ready to perpetuate a fond English elegy that he should, instead, be scrutinizing.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers

It drew inevitable parallels from critics to Nabokov's Lolita, although not always favourably for Hollinghurst.

BBC: NEWS | Entertainment | Hollinghurst's rise to Booker glory

Hollinghurst may at times have seemed to be secretly in love with the world of Gerald Fedden, the posh Tory M.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers

Reverend Prebendary Stephen Hollinghurst is to conduct the service in Presteigne and says it has been a difficult time for the community.

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This is a big, spacious novel, and Hollinghurst uses the history of the Valance and Sawle families to effect a moving commentary on English decline.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers

Hollinghurst's translation of Racine's play Bajazet was first performed in 1990.

BBC: NEWS | Entertainment | Hollinghurst's rise to Booker glory

Yet Hollinghurst also prosecutes Bryant in this novel: by the time we encounter him in the nineteen-eighties, he is a minor literary schemer, relentless, intrusive, and duplicitous.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers

This prose, whose repressed English control is admired by everyone from Alan Hollinghurst to Will Self, is drawn inexorably back to a fearful instability, to the nakedness of infancy.

NEWYORKER: Noble Savages

Given how thickly trafficked this corridor of English literary history has been in recent years, a writer like Hollinghurst can spin yards of this soft stuff practically in his sleep.

NEWYORKER: Sons and Lovers

Hollinghurst currently lives in London.

BBC: NEWS | Entertainment | Hollinghurst's rise to Booker glory