Hollinghurst

Above: one book that keeps cropping up again and again in any discussion of the 1980s is Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library. This is an actual copy from the late-1980s, a bit tatty, sold second-hand for 99p. The cover illustration is a representation of Michaelangelo's Dying Slave distorted as if seen through blue water.

Although now reduced to a "genre" novel, at the time the book was regarded as a serious literary work and won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1989.



Above: the book is packed with cultural allusions - to Ronald Firbank, to the Nuba of Southern Sudan, to Benjamin Brittain etc. One of the locations is a terracotta-faced hotel that can only be the Hotel Russell in Russell Square. The complexity of the text means it can be read on many different levels.



Above: Alan Hollinghurst later wrote The Line of Beauty (2004) which won the Booker Prize. The novel attracted considerable media attention for its recreation of the 1980s. As you can see in the picture, the book has become sufficiently significant as to appear in a carefully constructed image in a 2010 issue of World of Interiors magazine.