Novelists From England

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"The truly radical sub-text, however, is that a heroine can be politically motivated, a good dancer, attractive to the opposite sex, and fat all at the same time."

""The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," said Verbal Kint (paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire) in The Usual Suspects. This might have been true back in Kint's heyday, but nowadays it's depressingly obvious that devils do indeed exist, clad in the trappings of politics, religion or super-wealth as they sow conflict, contagion, oppression and conspiracy theories throughout the world."

"She's less one of the inner echelon of elder statesmen issuing judgement, and more your incredibly well-viewed friend who particularly loves genre movies, but also beer and cats."

"Catherine Cookson is at her most convincing when describing hardship and misery – her characters less powerful when happy and contented."

"Mrs Cookson certainly has a remarkable gift for bringing a tear to the eye."

"[T]he trouble with Cookson is that she is not, when all is said and done, a terribly interesting writer. Her popularity is a notable phenomenon, true, but she does not have the kind of outsize literary talent that could do justice to her outsize themes."

"Catherine Cookson in The Black Velvet Gown...has a story telling gift that would stop a runaway train."

"I've always been a jabberer. I just talked. I see everything in images. The plot sort of unfolds. Even the dialogue. In the morning, it's all there to put down."

"You see, until I was 16 my world was a short straight line: Jarrow, East Jarrow, Tyne Dock and East Shield, running along the river. I had everything to catch up. It wasn't until I grew up and read Lord Chesterfield that I began my education. He became my tutor and the public library my university."

"When Tom's school was evacuated to St Albans during the war we had a little flat opposite the library. I took a book every day: Chaucer, Emerson, John Donne. Good plain writing, no hyperbole. I would have liked to have studied philosophy. Homespun philosophy, that's what you get in my books."

"The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster."

"Surely even the most vehement of ideologues couldn’t find anything wrong with Norway?"

"Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine."

"“I have to congratulate you,” she murmured as we walked, “on the thoroughness of your preparations. Every document and contact indicates that you are who you claim to be, a great achievement considering that you are not.”"

"“Do you think you’ve ever made a difference to the course of linear events?” I inquired. “Have you, personally, ever affected the outcome of a war?” “Fuck no!” He chuckled. “We’re just fucking soldiers. We kill some guys, they kill our guys, we kill their guys back—none of it fucking means anything, you know? Just numbers on a page, and only when the numbers get big enough do the fat cats who decide this shit sit down and go, ‘Wow, let’s make the decisions we were always gonna have to make anyway.’ I’m no threat to temporal events, partner—I’m just the fire in the stove. And you know the best bit?” He beamed, climbing to his feet, tossing a fist full of bunched-up notes into the corner of the hut, like a master throwing scraps to a pet. “None of it fucking matters. Not one bullet, not one drop of blood. None of it makes any fucking difference at all.”"

"Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant."

"“Go with it?”… “Don’t fight against inevitability,” I translated loosely. “Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don’t hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed—what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.” “Everyone’s a decent person,” she replied softly, “in their own eyes.”"

"Complexity should be your excuse for inaction."

"Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers."

"Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it."

"There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost."

"A scientific argument must have some degree of data, some…some sniff of theoretical basis behind it; otherwise it’s not a scientific argument, it’s a philosophical debate."

"The roads were defined merely by the place where the mud was most pressed down."

"“Politics,” he spat. “Everyone is always looking for material to use against everybody else.”"

"“Where have you been?” he asked. “Walking in the woods,” she said."

"“Have I told you about Christ?” “Ghost-born-man-walking-on-water-telling-stories-dead-on-tree. Yes. You’ve told me about him. Show me more feathers.”"

"All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them."

"Lavondyss for you—for all of us—is what we are able to remember of ancient times…”"

"Nothing has happened until it happens."

"God grew out of the memories of powerful men."

"When so much is lost in the dark of time there must be a myth to glorify that lost knowledge."

"“I really didn’t mean to steal it.” Mr. Williams shook his head. He scratched at his chin nervously. “Why not? That’s what they’re there for. Tunes belong to everybody. So do stories.”"

"Skills used unselfishly make for cooperation."

"If there are, as some tenets imply, a distinction of heavenly situations, will not this good-minded people occupy the first in rank; for nearest to the divine attributes of any thing you can have a conception of, is their kind-heartedness and probity. In a word, their manners are highly interesting, from their simplicity and liberal-mindedness; and I blush to feel how superior to all that Christianity can boast, of peace and goodwill towards men. ... I felt myself in danger of becoming a Braminate, though all the wealth of Indostan could not bribe me to become a Mahometan."

"There's hard porn, soft porn and Jilly Cooper. Not that Mrs Cooper's latest little nonsense would get any Portnoy award, but I do worry about the influence on young minds of this peculiar combination of romantic fantasy and permissiveness (Barbara Cartland without the iron knickers). Fired by such goings-on as are chronicled in Octavia, heaven knows what the precociously pubescent will get up to."

"People are going to be sent to prison for saying somebody's common soon, aren't they? Really. You can’t say anybody’s fat, you can’t say anybody’s anything, now. Not that one wants to say people are fat, but mind you, they are huge, aren’t they. Enormous. Enormous [...] I hate people being hurt. But nobody can say anything now. Anyway, enough of that [...] And all this [anti] wolf-whistling. I love being wolf-whistled at. I’m that generation. All contributions gratefully received."

"The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things."

"They are unbelievable the upper classes, aren't they? They just have to screw. They've always been like that. I suppose it has changed a bit today as they don’t want to get whatsitnamed [#MeToo'd]."

"[In her novel, Score, a male character is murdered while sexually aroused.] I rang Stroud police to ask whether the male member stays up at the point of death. They told me it definitely does."

"[On meeting the editor of The Sunday Times magazine at a dinner party in 1969.] I told him about being a young wife: screwing all night, then going to work, shopping, doing the housework, doing one's husband's dinner, then screwing all night again."

"[On the absence of condoms in her sex scenes.] I can't do that. When do you stop to put it on? They're awful. You see, because I never had babies [her two children are adopted], I never had to worry about all that. Actually, that's not true. I did, because I didn't know [that she couldn't have children]. I wish I had known. God, I'd have had fun. But you were absolutely terrified of getting pregnant. I was too early for the pill. I had a dutch cap. They were terrible. It used to fly across the room. I left it behind when I went on honeymoon. My mother had to send it on. I was never very organised."

"I'm quite depressed about sex at the moment [...] I don't think people are having nearly so much fun. And everywhere you go, people are marrying their own sex, aren't they?"

"There were 600,000 dead, 14,000,000 driven from their homes 100,000 young girls kidnapped by both sides, forcibly converted or sold on the auction block ... One convoy of Sikhs and Hindus from West Punjab was 74 miles long, and raiders (Muslim mobs) who attack it constantly en route did not need to watch for it: they could smell its coming, for it was riddled with cholera and other foul diseases ... there took place murder, looting, burning and raping such as the world had not seen since the days of Chengiz Khan."