It's about the heady world of Thatcherite success, extraordinary wealth, sex and cocaine in which Nick moves, combined with the growing spectre of AIDS, and his underlying love for his academic study of Henry James (also, incidentally, a favourite of mine). The novel is about the coming of age of Nick in the 1980s as a young gay man living in the house of a rapidly-rising rich, Conservative MP, Gerald Fedden. But more broadly, and as Nick explains to Wani's family, it's 'a sort of animating principle' for the novel as, it seems to me, are Hogarth's works more broadly. The actual phrase 'line of beauty' only gets a handful of mentions and is ostensibly the ' ogee' form and name adopted by the main protagonist Nick Guest and his millionaire lover Wani Ouradi for their luxurious new magazine. The presence of these ideas in Hollinghurst's novel is understated but compelling. His argument was that beauty was in the serpentine, or curved, line found in nature, and especially the female body, rather than the contorted, mannerist forms that contemporary art connoisseurs lauded in old master painting, or indeed in the lines of a machine. William Hogarth proposed the idea of the 'line of beauty' as the key principle behind natural beauty in his self-portrait of 1745, and developed it in his art theoretical treatise The Analysis of Beauty in 1753. I first heard of the novel in 2006 when friends were watching the BBC adaptation, but I'm ashamed to say that I'd never made the connection with Hogarth until hearing a conference paper on it last summer and promptly buying a second-hand copy from Amazon.

But I’ve finally finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and it merits some consideration for obvious reasons.

I don't discuss books on here very often, partly because while doing the PhD I felt there'd be more than enough book discussing going on in that, and partly because I no longer get through novels very quickly.

The line of beauty book