Alan Hollinghurst

"[John Betjeman's] ability to make people laugh resounds through this book as persistently as church bells do through his poems."

"When I first came here Hampstead Heath] I was starting my second novel, The Folding Star, which is a very twilight book, a time of day I've always loved. On those summer evenings when I set out on walks, I'd often end up on a bench here, analysing the changing light and the colours. There was a lot of pastoral poetry woven into that book; I think I was filling out an imaginary landscape based on the one in front of my house."

"I was sent there Canford School] in 1967, at the age of thirteen, and at some point in my first year was issued with the OUP anthology Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold. This was my introduction to "Tintern Abbey", "Kubla Khan", Keats's Odes and many other poems which, read over and over, became and have remained a sort of inner music for me, whether purposely memorised or not. But the one of the fifteen who spoke most persuasively to my adolescent mind was Tennyson, in "The Lady of Shalott", "Ulysses" and the lyrics from The Princess; I won the junior reading competition with a passage from "Morte d’Arthur", making the most of the "sharp-smitten" clanging crags and "the long glories of the winter moon". Those effects, like many of Tennyson's best, are slightly over-orchestrated, a display of unrestrained assonantal genius, with a fascinating power of prickling the scalp, much treasured at that age, and for me never lost."

"Other reviewers have noted the strong overtones in Hollinghurst's novel of Proust as well as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, but there is a distinctly Jamesian aura that plays around the stressed and complex analogies The Line of Beauty proposes among social privilege, social transgression, economic ravenousness, and inviolable commitments to pleasures of various kinds and intensities."

"Hollinghurst moves characters between background and foreground in different sections, meticulously picking up figures, information, ideas strewn earlier to shine a different light on past and present alike: the technique of staggered information, always a mainstay of narrative, has been fashioned into something altogether more transformative, more pointed. It is woven with stupendous deftness, its internal assonances making a complex, comprehensive harmony."

"There are strong echoes of Powell and Waugh, but Hollinghurst's richly textured narrative and achingly evocative prose is masterful and his alone."

"Carrying both this comedy and the book's angry elegies is Hollinghurst's beautiful prose, which mixes the colloquial and the aesthetic to produce a language at once physical, lyrical and austere."