The Swimming-Pool Library

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Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. An Introduction. [1976]. New York: Vintage, 1990. Multi-purpose activity rooms available to book for a range of community activities including parties, meetings, social events and clubs. 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.” All you need to do is get a LiveWire membership. It’s easy, and there are lots of different options. What you can do at your local leisure centre

You can do different things at each leisure centre, but a LiveWire membership means you can go to any centre and use the gym or swimming pool, book tennis courts and other sport pitches, and go to fitness classes. there was one thing that consistently amused me, in a good way: the effete and fatuous queen of a lead character is also a rough, tough top. i like that! it is always interesting when expectations and stereotypes are subverted. sadly, those instances are the only examples of any kind of subversiveness. However this book has a moral agenda - sort of, a history lesson and hidden depths. William is approached by Lord Nantwich, a man whose life he had previously saved while loitering in a public lavatory, to write his biography and through the research and reading Nantwich's diaries he uncovers elements of a sad and unpleasant past, previously hidden to him. 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. 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.Great writing but it felt a bit half-baked at times. Was he trying to touch every base in post-Wilde gay fiction? Does this explain why the story was a little odd at times? Hollinghurst followed with The Folding Star in 1994, which was also short listed for the Booker, and The Spell in 1998. He writes, he has said, 'at walking pace', a rate of 300 to 400 words a day, or perhaps none. His close friend Andrew Motion remarks: 'I sometimes ask him, "What have you been doing today?" and he says, "thinking".' Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

And what about now? “The distinctive purpose of gay writing, its political purpose or its novelty or its urgency have gone, and the gay world, as it changes, is perhaps not so stimulating to a fiction writer like me,” he says – although he’s careful to make clear he’s talking about his own writing rather than issuing blanket statements. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be written about.” He still does the competition, and 'he'll say things like, "seven eluded me", when I've spent three months on it and only got one,' notes Peter Strauss, who bought The Line of Beauty when he was at Picador (he is now an agent). 'And then he'll tell me that was wrong.' The story is interestingly told through the eyes of a thirtyish gay man in the prime of his life simply lounging, working out, and having sexual encounters of the various kind. The plot dupes you into regarding the plot as non-existent and that the book will tell the typical tale of a lounger, but the author starts dropping hints to an underlying secret.Will is a member of the Corinthian Club (‘the Corry’) at which he swims, exercises and cruises men. The Corry is in no formal sense a gay club, indeed it is made clear that there are non-gay members, but there is a pervasive homoerotic atmosphere. I read this book because it's on a lot of "Best Gay Novel" lists. At first I thought it made the lists because there's a ton of sex in it. Maybe that's part of it. The novel’s chief fault lies in its (confessedly) autobiographical nature. There are problems with the shape of the story and with the liberating climax of the Stonewall riot, which does not feel at all achieved in fictional terms: it just happens. Perhaps White’s point is that the central events of our lives can seem curiously downbeat as they are occuring – but at the same time the narrator goes out of his way to say how excited he was by the events at the Stonewall, so that explanation will not quite hold. By this time, Hollinghurst was working at the Times Literary Supplement. There is a sense in his books of life opening up for young people in London, and his friends suggest that this was very much his experience, and that it accelerated following the publication of his first novel.