Gleaming pictures of the past

If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt Affair, you’ll almost certainly be right. Once again, Hollinghurst explores British gay history by plunging us into haute bohemia over several decades of the 20th century. (A few years ago he told an interviewer that the main characters in his next book ‘will all be more or less heterosexual’: a plan that sounded pretty unlikely at the time and, seeing as this is his next book, was evidently abandoned.) Once again, he combines his broad sweep with plenty of equally impressive close-up analysis — and all in prose that manages to be both utterly sumptuous and utterly precise.

The novel opens in wartime Oxford, where a group of Christ Church students have spotted an unknown hunk in the rooms opposite. He is, it turns out, David Sparsholt, who’s due to be there for only a term before joining the RAF.