Alan Hollinghurst was one of Granta magazine’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 1993, and worked on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982-95. As one might therefore expect, his writing is clever and highly literary. It is also seductive: his three novels so far each have a kind of dark allure, elegance and erudition, passages of dream-like beauty. Alongside all this lies sexual explicitness in depicting gay men’s lives: art and sex are the consuming passions in a realm ‘where happiness can depend upon the glance of a stranger, caught and returned'. Hollinghurst’s fiction casts a spell with its atmospheres of decadence, and always alludes knowingly to its forbears Wilde, Proust, and Ronald Firbank (the latter provides the presiding epigraph for The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and appears within it as a minor character). The novels each have in common a pursuit-of-the-love-object theme, for which the models are Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. They offer readers, of whatever orientation, insights into the contemporary gay world, but these are set against a wider backdrop of art in all its forms, and obsession – in all its manifestations – with many amusing apercus.