paradigm of the line of continuity defines a pattern that may be approached from different perspectives in The Swimming Pool Library. The spatial dimension is first implied by the references to the Underground system, to what Will calls its “connexiveness” ( SPL 46), and, to the fastidious rectilinearity of the Central Line, which he deplores so much. As in E. M. Forster’s Maurice, the train affords unheard-of opportunities for casual encounters. It may be a hotbed of delightful promiscuity. This is an aspect which is of course present in Hollinghurst’s mapping of gay London. Yet, the novelist exploits even further the narrative potential offered by the Underground, by opening his fiction with a scene in a wagon, with two maintenance men sitting across from the well-off, hedonistic narrator protagonist. Because the transport workers can only go about their jobs when no travelling takes place, even if their lives depend on travels, their anonymous presences are mentioned, to introduce the motif of “inverted lives” ( SPL 1). From the outset, The Swimming Pool Library, which is a London novel, posits the spectral presence of its subterranean double: the mesh of intersecting tunnels below the ground, and the unlit platforms of ghost stations. It's being run in conjunction with the local authority and aims to offer "something for everyone," according to CEO of Celtic Leisure, Richard Lewis. Alongside open swim sessions, the swimming pool and learners' pool will also host regular swimming lessons for children, free swim sessions for select age groups, aqua fitness classes, children's' swimming parties, and swimming lessons for school groups. Many novelists do journalism to top up their earnings. Hollinghurst does the odd book review and literary essay, but he doesn't do punditry. Isn't he tempted? "No," he says, "I don't really have opinions. After The Line Of Beauty, I was always getting requests from newspapers, asking me what the election meant for Labour, that sort of thing. I said I didn't have the faintest idea what the election meant for Labour. I just happened to have written a book that had a Tory politician in it." He is also deeply interested in the form of the novel – a form in which he says he has an “undiminished confidence”, feeling that people will continue to want to read it for a long time to come. Our conversation about reflecting historical change in fiction leads him to an astute observation, about “a larger question, which one’s always seeing articles about, wondering why there are so few mobile phones in novels”. His view is that there is something “inherently old-fashioned in the novel. There is a subconsciously retrospective element of entering the world of a novel, even if it’s about something burningly contemporary. There’s something old-fashioned about the experience of being narrated to.” But Hollinghurst’s novels, including his latest, The Sparsholt Affair, which ranges from 1940 to the present day and features a kaleidoscope of narratives, require expansiveness and the sense of a large canvas on which to unfold; he needs a certain airiness to contrast with his focus on his characters’ intimate, and often secret, lives. In his last novel, The Stranger’s Child, he began just before the first world war and moved forwards to explore the effect of a sexually charismatic young poet over subsequent decades. The Sparsholt Affair also employs that novel’s five-part structure, with jumps in time and perspective and narrative gaps carefully exploited to maximise mystery and ambiguity.

In The Spell, Alex – who has "contracted the occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past" – recalls his horror of the country town in which he'd grown up, with its "old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes [and] photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum". He also tenderly recalls the solitary child's "taste for lonely places", playing hide and seek alone. "It can't be hide and seek if no one's coming to look for you, darling," his mother tells him. "It's just hide." Through Nantwich's diary, the novel is also concerned with the lives of gay men before the gay liberation movement, both in London and in the colonies of the British Empire. A typical Hollinghurst character, like him, is an only child. Often, his creations seem to stand on the edge of things, keen to engage with the melee, convivial, socially adept and alive to the currents between people, and yet happy to retreat to their own company when needed. There must be a link, surely? An emergency meeting was held at the Town Hall in Aberdeen for councillors to have a second vote on budget cuts. Following deliberations, the decision was confirmed by a vote of 24-21. Motion bought The Swimming-Pool Library when he was editorial director of Chatto: 'I knew it was going to be good, but I was flabbergasted by how brilliant it was.' Hollinghurst became godfather to Motion's eldest child.Hollinghurst enjoyed his time at Canford, and wrote enthusiastically about it in the old boys' magazine, the Canfordian, a couple of years ago, recalling with affection two teachers who had opened his mind to poetry, painting and architecture. The critic Peter Parker, who was at school with him, says he "never thought of him as a boy – he always seemed old". Parker recalls that Hollinghurst had a self-deprecating manner and even then his trademark bass voice, and that the poetry he wrote for the magazine Parker founded was mature and fully formed: "I am rather proud to have been his first publisher." But those who know him insist that underneath the erudition and the witty, high-camp banter, he is emotional; indeed, that he's a person of particularly deep emotion. 'He's a loving person,' says Alan Jenkins. 'He's very loyal. He's not promiscuous: he falls in love with people and he's had terrible heartbreaks and unhappiness. Love and affection is very central in his life and I'm sure he'd like that to figure in his domestic life.' From the diaries, Will learns that Nantwich has been to Egypt and then returned to London, where he met with Ronald Firbank: an extraordinary portrait of effete decrepitude, camp and alcoholic.

The buildings he sees around him seem to disregard ‘anything the eye or heart might fix on as homely or decent’, and he finds the estate defaced with National Front graffiti: ‘“Kill All Niggers” or “Wogs Out”.’ It is at these moments, in which Will’s ignorance and distaste for the working-class areas comes through, that he is at his most political in revealing the massive divisions that remain in British society. Travelling around on the tube, Will does not so much mind as confront the gaps that exist between races, classes, and subcultures in 1980s London. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other, with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine." Auden, Wystan Hugh. The Enchafèd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber, 1953. Aberdeen City Council said: “The council is facing significant financial pressures in 2023/24 and is having to reduce its spending in a number of areas.

It’s such a great resource for promoting both mental and physical wellbeing and I hear people saying that when they attend the pool.” But if the richness of the book is a matter of detail and specificity, its cleverness has a lot to do with one bold technical stroke, which is summarisable by the fact that there are no women characters in The Swimming-Pool Library. The novel adheres rigidly to Will’s point of view, and that point of view is strictly circumscribed. His absolute immersion in London gay life has the effect of excluding women and heterosexuals from his consciousness (the only heterosexuals in the novel, both of them fleetingly characterised, are Will’s brother-in-law and his grandfather). The effect of this circumscription is enhanced by the temporal location of the novel in 1983, before the first UK deaths from Aids occurred. The general election passes by without remark, nor is anything said about the Falklands war of the preceding year – that is, until Will comes close to having sex with an Argentinian (‘I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film’). Will’s ignorance about Aids gives a flavour of the summer of 1914 to the summer of 1983, and the limited nature of his Weltanschauung makes him not especially likeable but at the same time curiously prelapsarian and innocent. His hedonistic self-confidence, his sense that ‘I was both of the world and beyond its power,’ has a historical poignancy of which he is unaware. Large sports hall with six badminton courts and the ability to host two five-a-side football pitches. At the Corry, Will is attracted to Phil, a young bodybuilder. Despite his physique, Phil is shy and a sexual novice. Will suspects that Phil is the man with whom he had sex in the cinema. The Sparsholt affair, by contrast, despite one of the character’s memories of it – “Money, power … gay shenanigans! It had everything” – seems puzzlingly unscandalous; the reader intuits simply a threesome. “It’s happened at a time, of course,” says Hollinghurst, “when, if it was, as we have reason to think it was, a gay threesome, it’s illegal. It’s happening before the changes in the law that we’re celebrating at the moment.”

The theme is emphasised and its general applicability is tested by passages in the novel which deal with the work of the generation of artists who did their work in the closeted pre-Wolfenden climate. If the idea of ‘homosexual writing’ is useful, it probably applies best to the period when homosexuality was criminal, and hence when the fictional treatment of same-sex love had to be implicit, indirect, deflected, latent. Hollinghurst’s unpublished M. Litt thesis, which I stumbled across as a graduate student, made a forceful case for this idea as applied to the work of Firbank, Hartley and Forster. His novel takes up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with Will’s visit to the opera in the company of his grandfather: the opera is Britten’s Billy Budd. Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. Rupert has been told to watch out for Arthur; he reports that he has seen him with his brother Harold. Another protester Karen Barrett-Ayres said: “I am in recovery from brain surgery and I have reduced mobility. I can’t travel to a library that’s further afield.” Your local leisure centres are run by LiveWire, a community interest company (CIC) who look after leisure, library and lifestyle services in Warrington.

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On the train, Will cruises a young man whom he takes home; they engage in sexual intercourse. He begins to read Charles's papers. I first read this novel for ‘pleasure’– whatever that means – before I came to Queen Mary, and now at the close of my undergraduate years, I’ve dedicated a year to studying and writing about it. Just as much fun as it was when I read it as a teenager, I decided to revisit it with academic lenses on, focusing on the politics of the 1980s, issues of representation, and invocations of the past. For me, thinking about all of this within a novel I never read in a classroom has been a great way of getting to know it better – and I will excommunicate anyone who says studying a book makes you hate it. What I’ve found is that so much of what I really enjoyed in ‘casually’ reading the novel comes up again and again in what I think provides the potential for ‘formal’, academic discussion.

Protesters said they won’t stop their fight, despite being unable to voice their concerns at Monday’s meeting. Many people thought Hollinghurst should have won the Booker last time he was short listed; there were suspicions that the graphic descriptions of sex might have put off one or two of the judges. You can also see an artist's visualisation of how the completed building will look in the document below:Many of Ronald Firbank's books are mentioned – The Flower Beneath the Foot, Valmouth, Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations, among other ones. Approval was also recently granted to transform Melksham House into a flexible workspace and a multi-purpose area for the community, with prep work to get underway in July, and construction to commence from September.