An intricate, witty, playful meditation on what is now beginning to emerge as one of Hollinghurst’s chief concerns: Englishness. Comedy of manners, investigation of class, changing political and social landscape – all the reliable pleasures that his fiction offers – are here in their dense, detailed richness... It is woven with stupendous deftness, its internal assonances making a complex, comprehensive harmony... A magnificent coherence.

Masterful... There is a huge cleverness to the book at a structural and, as it were, managerial level. Characters are named with an aptness which is light-footed and unswervingly accurate... Hollinghurst, as ever, is quietly brilliant about architecture, both in the specific sense of a cultural discourse about buildings, and the broader sense of how people behave in different kinds of place... there is something symphonic about [the novel’s] wholeness. There is also something filmic in the book’s enveloping embrace; not the heritage cinema of Merchant Ivory et al, but the more experimental, argumentative efforts of the Sixties and Seventies. I often found myself recalling Joseph Losey’s version of The Go-Between, and occasionally the anguished exquisites of Michelangelo Antonioni... there’s also a lot that is purely and simply very funny.